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| free, public domain audiobooks. 'nuff said. you can subscribe in itunes like a podcast and finally get to tell your more literate friends that you too "read" war and peace, which i should be able to say by the time i arrive in scranton next week. maybe.
has anyone ever made coffee in your car? any suggestions?
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| i can't recall a point in my life, ever, where i can say i've ever planned on driving across nebraska. being an astronaut, or swimming in scrooge mcduck's vault, yes and yes, but strapping myself into four cylinders of fun and hurtling across the cornhusker state at a balmy 72 mph... never. and now, less than a quarter into the 27th year of my life, i'm planning to span the traverse for a fourth time. it feels like getting stabbed with a knife made of pop rocks (no experience).
i've gotten a lot better at driving long distances - this will be my fourth trip across the country. everyone that reads this blog knows exactly why i'm making the trip so i'll spare you the drama, but i've never not looked forward to it. something about it is always somewhat thrilling. it's not something you can justify doing all to often, so when you get to you really have to pay attention to the poetry and hope your outcome is better than the Joads. at the rate of one such trip about every 7 years or so, i'll be headed to seattle when i turn thirty-five. at the rate that i change jobs and locations, i'll be writing this blog again next summer. (anyone else depressed by that statement? your feelings, please share them.)
i'm sitting at a coffee shop in boise, id, in this little neighborhood-within-a-neighborhood called hyde park, located in the north end of boise, a pseudo-suburban residential area in boise known for its cute old houses and its charm. the shop is located next to a gas station (the stinker) which is not a bad thing in boise because no one actually buys gas there. to explain it further, i once saw a bicycle chained to a pump. i wasn't sure if that was just irony or a protest but it sums up the area pretty well: bikes, babies, and the slow, sad lilt of a remarkably depressing folk singer letting everything out on his sleeve a la unplugged acoustic guitar at the restaurant next door.
....what diiiiiiiid i doooooo, i looooooove youuuuuuuuu, oh baaabe come back to meeeeee...
(slow clap)
the restaurant has a marquis (i know, right?) that says in big red marquis letters BUY IDAHO NOT CHINA.
...i've been havin' a sweet dream... been dreamin' since i woke up todaaaaaaaay...
ladies and gentlemen, he does do the whistling!
so, thanks for reading this. i could make an empty promise that i will in fact blog again soon, but a quick trip through the archives here would quickly reveal me to be a terrific liar. anyone out there remember the ill-fated "lent of blog?" that might not have even been this blog, come to think of it. so, ok then, until next time.
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| 47,000 feet above witchita, i met a medium. i have no idea what her name was.
i know, this may come as shocking news for the floowiing reasons:
1. i'm blogging again
2. after a long period of non-news, we now know that vito talks to mediums
3. he also apparently talks to the people he sits next to on airplanes
4. what kind of airplane flies that high. i wonder if the oxygen masks were deployed.
she noticed a magazine i had purchased. i had just woken up, it was a 6:30am flight and i had left my parents home in scranton, pennsylvania at 2am to make two and a half hour trip to JFK terminal 7 in my super gizmo toyota prius. startting your day, starting it, at a time you are consistently used to ending it, is a feeling akin to jet lag and does lead to a quandary when you're left to consider what time your meals are supposed to be.
2am - breakfast
7am - lunch
12p - dinner
add to that flying west by two time zones, remarkable constipation, and the medium trying to "mediate" (??) your life, and yes, there is my day, more or less. so far.
i also found out recently that production of my favorite adult malt beverage, zima, has been halted, and i'd never even had a chance to try it. tough life.
the magazine was "popular photography." it's a periodical for photo gear=heads that does a lot of reviews, product and practice analysis. it pays a ttention to the art, but addresses it from a technical point of view and reminds me consistently of the following items:
1. i need to take a proper photo course.
2. i need to upgrade to and learn CS4
3. i would need a loan or a second job to buy any worthwhile lens
she asked if i was a photographer and i said "amateur." which i think i correct. i do not get paid for my photography, nor do people ever bring me into their lives for the sole purpose of utilizing my photography. occassionally, i take pictures for tourists standing in front of fountains, but none of these have ever been genuinely excited about the picture i took for them. why do i walk away and they don't? because i have somewhere to go, and they're waiting until i get far enough away to try to get someone else to take their picture without me noticing. tourists are at least courteous in this respect. restaurants are another situation. do not ever, ever try to modify an order of goulash in hungary. it will not go well.
so based on the fact that i have been sleeping and i am now an admittedly amateur photographer reading a gear-head magazine on a flight to pheonix, the medium now knows that i will someday be a great photographer, and that i will live and work both domestically and abroad as a picture-taker. she says that i will achieve great things by it, and that my humility, and the health of my body will lead me thusly. we then spoke about how important it was to take care of your body, touching briefly on the following topics:
- sitting outside
- having snacks
- kombucha
- ginger
- dark chocolates
through all of this, she never saw any of my pictures, but, she did tell me that i should go look at some of the pictures that i have taken and look for spirits in them. she then pulled out a book and told me what some of the spirits looked like: circles, smoke, garage door openers, and out of focus pictures. i told her about the aura camera at the holistic health center in lennox. she said she'd heard of it. then she took out a portable DVD player and watched The Mummy, telling me before she began that she loves egypt. so do i, so do i.
so as i'm sitting here on this other plane (pheonix to boise) openly calculating exactly what the impact of this blog will (narcissist!) or willn't (realist!) be, i'm thinking about what the medium says because i'm also at a point where i could be in another phase of re-invention. the proceedings of the next few days and weeks will likely do a lot to decide my role in arts administration. it is, as are the times, uneasy yet exciting. if you want to hear more on this, you're going to have to call me, as the situation is slightly more detailed than a blog will allow.
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that was all written yesterday, half delirious on a plane. i'm not a gonna edit it, so there you have it. purestreamofconsciousness.
enjoy.
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| i want to note, before i begin whatever this is to become, that it's probably not about what you think it's about, no matter what. you might think you have a pretty good idea of what i'm going on about, but i'll help you understand that you don't, because i don't, or at least before having started writing anything of substance here i have no idea what the substantive text of this note will be. it's still to be determined, as are many things, in general, one of which is not suburban sprawl.
and about suburban sprawl, i have recently re-realized a truth which i already knew about myself in the fact that i do not enjoy suburban sprawl. for a number of reasons. one of which is the having to need to drive through it. a lot. recently. sweet hot screaming neon danger mice, do i abhor mega versions of things that need not be mega, or things, at all. just this sunday i sat on the edge of a planter watching overweight suburbanites stuffing massive amounts of plastic crap from the container store into their subawu's. they proceed to drive like morons through a poorly designed parking lot, make illogical if not dangerous consumption choices as they pull into starbuck's drive-thru, and then write emails on their cell phones with irresponsible amounts of abbrevs.
i am, of course, angry at things that are beyond my control, and i am dedicating my frustrations, as i have before and will again, to my hole in the internet. thank you for providing analysis.
i am sitting on the floor in the bathroom of my hotel room here in pennsylvania. i'm not goingto tell you what town but i will point out that there is a bottle opener mounted to the side of the bathroom counter. it's currently 2:25am eastern time, i had been asleep until about 1:45am. at which point i woke up. and was unable to fall asleep. and since then i have been rolling over concepts of professionalism and decorum, ruminating on the role of certain designer elements of the clandestine, and wondering why God why would anyone consciously install fluorescent tube lighting as the overhead vanity light in any bathroom.
unfortunately, bathroom vanity lighting is a common application for fluorescent tube lighting, and this bathroom marks the third such installation i have consciously noted in my lifetime. the first application was i think a truck stop bathroom, and was noted a few years ago. the second was the bathroom of a woman i dated last year, who i think has since unsubscribed to this blog, but i can't quite be sure, and as such if you are reading this i should probably have asked you what you were up to recently, but neglected to do so in our most recent spate of text messages.
a quick note to hotel decorators: why.
unnecessary clarification: what's going on guys. come on. i'm not saying wallpaper is a bad idea for some applications, but we need to divorce ourselves from the wallpaper-as-carpeting concept, or at least the wallpaper-as-inspiration-for-carpet-concept. i've never wallpapered a thing in my life, but i've seen some people do so and i have a tremendous amount of respect for the trade. not so with this particuar shade or design of wallpaper. it's orange. and red. floral, illogically, precocious, urbane?, and understandably but nauseatingly repetitive. in the bathroom. lit by lighting. and that lighting is making noise. ymca gym lighting noise, somehow ok in the gym because you think hey, this is a gym, i'm not here to worry about how loud the lights are. i think that though if you wanted to take a relaxing bath in the plastic refitted bathtub here, you might get annoyed by the lights, or just turn them off and bathe in the dark, which sounds rather relaxing.
i sometimes (today) wonder if it's possible to have a geo-nemesis. this could be more superstitious than anything, and likely is, but i wonder if there are certain parts of the country, world, time-space fabric, that just have it out for you. i think mine might be this town? or, this could just be a town of hard medicine and i just blame it for many more things than it's actually guilty of. it never really plays a part in any bad news i get, i just happen to be here when it hits. it could be some sort of trigger, light a stop light censor, that trips when i drive past it, and pat sajak maybe hits the brake on his giant Wheel just as bankrupt comes careening into view. you know pat had a brake for that thing. he had to. why couldn't you ever see his feet? eh? you mean to tell me that some of those last second flipper jumps just happened naturally? on a wheel that size? shut your big fat faces.
i used to imagine that pat and alex were friends, or that alex would wait nearby for pat to finish his show.
i also think that i might someday, or might have someday wanted to be a judge on jeopardy. i don't imagine that job not being at least moderately entertaining, depending on your particular mood. i think if you put someone spicy in the judge seat, you could really reak havoc on the minds of some scholars. why did people get dressed up for those shows? why didn't anyone on those programs ever achieve the level of celebrity that certain reality tv show personnel do?
i fly back to the bois tomorrow - bwi to salt lake city to bois. i'm looking forward to it. i'm still not quite settled there, and i probably won't be for a while, but it is at least starting to feel like a home. i'm subletting a dancer's apartment for december, and actually i should probably check in on that, that has the potential to be a moderately confusing situation.
we jet off to new orleans soon, for a week, for a world premiere. this trip should be the easiest segment of our fall tour but is somehow causing me the most aggita. maybe that's why i'm awake right now? we spend a week in, actually, nevermind, i think suddenly maybe that, no, nevermind my brief,
i had a lot of coffee tonight, but then i had a g&t at the bar, it was pretty strong and after a day of driving and mind numbing conference blotter i suppose i should be tireder, more tired, more having of less energy but if i'm just going stream-of-consciousness here and it's 3am i'm not really tired and the coffee that you get at these things isn't really that good or that strong so just in general i think that i'llbe here writing for maybe the next three hours when my computer battery suddny goes dead. imagine, three hours of typing on a laptop only to be suddenly shocked and shattered when your battery suddenly poops itself, and you're wiping lion, pardon me, LiOn juice off your very hairy legs with your fancy cotton pin-striped boxers, maybe screaming a little bit, about sports and fair trade coffee beens, and there's not a lot you can do to stop your thighs from melting until your legs fall off. i'm imagining that LiOn batteries are caustic. i'm also imagining that maybe my boxers are a little bit fancier than they actually are, being that i got them from a 3-pack at target, they were incredibly cheap and are unfortunately too large and therefore not entirely efective, unless you judge the effectiveness of your undergarments by their ability to bunch and ride up your ass, in which case i would judge them to be highly effective. you also might think that larger boxers would do a batter job, or at least have a better "flap" system than these do, which would be false, because these are awful.
back to fate for a scosh, do you think i really think that pat is somehow inextricably tied up with lady fortune? i don't think so and i really want to make that abundantly clear.
we had breakfast at a place in dc this morning whose name i really can't remember, which is too bad because it was pretty nice. all i remember about it is an unfortunate way to start this sentence because i remember a lot about it but you wouldn't think by the sentence beginning that i chose would you no. this is all i remember about it: it's in NW dc and serves breakfast, it's on a corner, you have to drive over a bridge to get to it, they serve vats of coffee with two animal crackers and the food is pretty good. maybe the chorizo is keeping me up. at a very specific point in my life i had thought that i was allergic to sausage because after eating it i needed an appendectomy. what crap. imagine if every time you ate something you were allergic to you needed an appendectomy. that could get risky. and i wonder what is taking the place of my appendix right now, and if everytime i eat sausage i am filling up in that spot with sausage allergy, and now there's nothing there to protect me from my own dangerous obsession with well seasoned, macerated and tube-stuffed pork products. i should by this math be quite dead right now, headstone reading "poisoned by his love for bavarian delicacies." sigh.
the breakfast place though was pretty hip, or at least hip-inspired, and played a lot of wilco, which is a band i have come to thoroughly enjoy but frequently forget about. my feet just made a soundlikebongos. as far as breakfast music, or music for about any part of your day, i mean wilco has got to be on that playlist, somewhere, please, do yourself the favor. "nothing's ever, gonna change, and..." actually i don't really know all the lyrics but it is fun to sing, hum, la-la, along to and i suspect that the guys in the band might not mind so much if you didn't know all the lyrics because maybe, on some level, they don't either.
i'm not going to say that writing any of this is making me feel any better, and i'm pretty sure that when i wake up in the morning i'm going to have sour stomach and want to hurl. or i might just hurl. i felt like hurling earlier but it had been a while since i had eaten an overpriced buffet at this conference thing so i wasn't sure if i was up for it, or if my body would have anything to dedicate to my desire. that sounds fancy, doesn't it? read it again: if my body would have anything to dedicate to my desire. salty, mmm. i think the last time i puked was this summer, and i'm glad i did so. it really made me feel a lot better, physically, you know. like that feeling you get right after you puke. exactly like that.
i think, actually i know and i definitely should, start going to church again. for real. it's been a long long time since i had any sort of effective relationship with any faith structure or religion in my life and it's made me into a complete asshole. fruit of the devil sort of thing. and i swear to much. i don't think though that i'm going back to the teachings and the writings of cathol, because i'm maybe still upset with the tone, politics, and behaviors of the earthly caretakers of the church. that's not to say that other spins on christianity are altogether perfect, but it takes something stronger than i've got to go back to a place where i feel so burned. it's unfortunate. religion and faith are at their roots very simple things, incredibly important things, but at their core and in their constitution very very simple, and that's what i am most interested in. i'm not sure where it comes from but i had to memorize a lot of lists of fairly arcane words to be a cathol, and i still don't understand exactly what or why i had to commit them to me so hard.
somehow out here (referring to life in bois) people came to think i am a mormon. i'm not sure how this came about, or if anyone seriously still believes it, but i just want ot bury it into this overly rambiling body of text that i am not a mormon. i have nothing against the mormon faith, and i would be willing to attend at least one ceremony or mass or something just to see what it's all about, if you could ever get a grasp on an entire faith just by attending one ceremony. i don't think that's entirely possible.
we got to listening to a lot of 80s music this week,
ok, i'm going back to bed. thanks for listening, and remember what i said when i started saying things so long ago - none of this means anything you know anything about. i wrote for two hours in the middle of the night because everything is great, and i just had some concepts i needed to share.
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actually, seriously, everything is fine. i can't sleep because of a later than plausible coffee splurge, and new orleans is really making me anxious. combined with my hatred of suburbia and my lack of residence, and occasionally i need to jam on the keys for a bit. thanks!!!
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| we'll be leaving le bois tomorrow at 8am for a two week run to the following cities:
milwaukee, wi (actually brookfield, wi, but i think they're pretty close)
washington dc
olney, md
we'll be in wisconsin for over a week. awesome. cheese, cheese, cheese. dc is 3 days as is olney, and then i'll be going to state college, pa for a day to attend a presenter's conference. boise follows for four days, then to new orleans from the 16th to the 23rd. i don't yet know what i'll be doing for thanksgiving or new years eve, but i will be in PA for christmas. le bois at all other times.
i still don't have a place of my own. i really wish i did, it's be nice to have a place to settle into. i've been unreasonably shy since moving here, i think the lack of domicile has something to do with that. at this rate, i don't think i'll actually have an address until some time in december, at which point i may just sublet one of the dancer's apartments while they're out guesting. we don't have anything but office time in december an january, so i think this will be when i do most of my settling before we go back out on the road in early february. we're also moving our office and studio space to a new location this month, a sublet of a section of an arts school in le bois. when complete, the new space will be, i think, incredible. it's a very industrial looking space with exposed brick, cement flooring, garage doors and surface mounted lights switches and such. pretty cool. in true non-profit fashion, we'll be building a lot of the new office stuff ourselves. in bonus points non-profit fashion, i used a toilet brush to scrub gack off the windows today. i then washed the windows with a sponge mop. our GM is ferociously excited about this move and is practically boyish when he gets the opportunity to talk about it. what's even more exciting though is the fact that he's actually doing a lot of the work himself - strange, i thought, for a GM, but refreshing. we also had an all-staff meeting yesterday where we actually had a valid discussion with content applicable to the management of the company. no one held hands. i was giddy.
i'm starting to really get the hang of things now. unfortunately, i'm not quite the Rainmaker just yet. ah well. the people in the company and in le bois are all nice, and i'm quickly learning that the city is a pretty incredible place to live. i do wish, however, that someone would take care of all the red lights and the god-forsaken one way streets some urban planner from hell decided were so very vogue. ugh. i think i've gone the wrong way down a one way street at least 3 times this week. not cool. i think though, that once i get a home, i can sell my car and just bike everywhere. one way THIS.
so that's my life for now. bring on wisconsin.
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