Goo Goo Please

Bonnie Prince Billy at Iron Horse

2009-05-17T23:20:00.003-04:00

Jess and I went to Northampton for the Bonnie "Prince" Billy show at the Iron Horse.

I was still suffering from the back injury. It's much better, but still.

A back injury suddenly makes minor inconveniences -- waiting in lines, sitting on wooden bar stools -- into issues that revolve around critical health. I've been reading ChiRunning and know the drill. Rotate the knees inward. Align the chin and tuck the tailbone. Still, we waited for nearly an hour outside the club, in the drizzle. Once inside, my back hurt so much I asked the ticket taker if I could borrow a chair to rest for a moment. She asked some guy. "These chairs are going nowhere. No one is going to touch them." He looked at me like he was going to punch me. My back was stiff enough so that a knock down, drag out would have been better than simply standing there, but he was also a shrimp and had a bad goatee.

*

After the first song, I wondered if BPB was the best show I was ever going to see. He has a particular ability to take a song, bring it to a certain level of pleasure, and then just elevate once again. The harmonies. The dissonance. The sense of imperative.

He played "Holly Home" and "Work Hard/Play Hard" and "Hello/Goodbye" and other songs, some of which I recognized. I like his music, but I'm not the type to know the name of every damn song.

Eventually, my lumbar vertebrae were collapsing like ancient columns in the desert and I needed a rest. We luckily found a few chairs upstairs, just as they were being given up. Still, the day, with the long ride and the walk, had taken their toll and we left before he stopped playing. I'm only somewhat regretful. What started as potentially the best show over continued, and was good. But it would have sounded just as good, if not better, in headphones.

The rain had started falling. I ran to find the car. I didn't know the area, and got lost. I found it, eventually, by a fruit market. I drove back to find Jess and she jumped into the car, handing me a slice of pizza, telling me it was the best she'd ever eaten. She had ordered a slice of meat pizza for me, but they gave her mushroom. Fine by me. The crust was crisp and the heat even.

Once they rung her up, she realized that the two slices, with no drinks, cost fifteen dollars.

A day later, the fifteen would cause a long conversation about America, Europe, food, and the grid.

Soaked, we drove back to the hotel. There was a whirlpool hot tub in our room. I've never had this luxury before. I got inside, and it made my heart race, so I got out, covered with bubbles.

The lights were out, but our room as lit by the distant streetlamps.

*

I'm beginning to understand what's gone wrong with my back and how it connects with the month's long knee problems, and I'm narrowing it down: weak core muscles, tight hip flexors, and pronation when I walk. To remedy, I've started doing lots of sit up and core exercises, and I don't think this weekend would even have been possible without having done them this past week.

I've also developed a set of hip openers that brought me from crippled to concerned in a short period. Still, I've lost a tremendous amount of flexibility in my hips in a few short months.

*

I've continued to write, daily, mostly fiction. But now I'm disciplining myself to send out submissions to literary journals. I kept a log, and sent out five stories and one poem last week. I've already received my first rejection letter. Most journals aren't even taking submissions this time of year. But still, I hold to the promise: every day, another piece goes out.

MTEL

2009-05-09T22:01:00.002-04:00

I took the MTEL exam today, which tried my bones more than my mind. With the back injury, I can only sit up straight for a short period before I need to lie down -- I needed to sit up for hours today.

The worst came during the second half of the day, when I not only was breaking pencils in my hands I was so tense, but the guy behind me kept breathing oddly through his nose while I was trying to read Wordsworth. Fortunately, he finished and left early, and I finished in peace.

*

During lunch break, I noticed people lying in the grass, holding books. This made me happy.

First Nice Weekend

2009-04-26T20:38:00.002-04:00

Yesterday morning, Jess convinced me to go to the ER. My brother had optained some script level painkillers and we drove all the way to Nashua to pick them up. He had already left, I could barely stand up or sit down. We had the dog with us so we drove to my mother's house. She loves that dog, and I think that her chance to dogsit offset the normal mom-anxieties.

The doctor at Lowell General was great: talked about JFK, core strength, and climbing Mt. Rainier. Turns out it wasn't a herniated disc, but just a serious muscle strain that I reinjured this week. By Friday, I could barely eat or sleep because I felt so uncomfortable. Those who know me ought to be shocked. At my worst, I don't lose my appetite.

A shot and a painkiller still left me hardly able to walk, so I gave in and gobbled a handful of the pills. I'd been putting off taking anything, even refusing the spare percocents offered by a friend, but, at this point, I no longer cared.

An hour after the fistful of pharmaceutics, I could walk, bent but free. In relation to my struggles earlier in the day, I was flying, weightless. After spending three days lying down, being able to walk without pain counted as one of my life's great joys.

Late last night, Jess got up to go to bed, and, while feeding the dog, slipped in the water around the dish and banged her head. She became dizzy, mumbled incoherently, and showed signs of a concussion. I was still under the effects of the drugs, but was aware enough to make sure she was okay, even if I couldn't do much about it either way. This morning, she woke up and started vomiting, so it was back to the ER, this time in Groton.

The stay there was even longer: the doctor was sharp -- I overheard him talking knowingly on the phone about neologisms and aphasia, just where the writer and the doctor are closest -- but it was a small hospital and the staff were hit by a string of emergencies after our arrival. Sitting, first next to Jess on the gurney, and then in a chair, caused a lot of stress on my spine, and, by the time we left hours later, not only were we hungry having not eaten all day, but I was back to walking with my body bent like a cheese curl.

Having not eaten all day, but having been kept right across from the nurses's station, where chips and bon bons and cake and sandwiches and sodas were nearly constantly consumed by the team, Jess was famished despite the day's difficulties and we loaded up on subs, chips, nuts, and sodas as soon as we got back on 119. The sun was starting to set. We had to go pick up the Dufflebag. First nice weekend of the year, and we saw it pass us by through hospital windows.

*

Thankfully, living in the horizontal world gives me plenty of time to read and watch movies: finished Yates, started Geoff Dyer; saw Mongol, Bourne Ultimatum, The Changeling, and four of the recent South Park episodes. Enjoyed all, except for Bourne -- spy thrillers don't have much of a pull on me. I'll leave it to others to figure out why.

I have been reading Sherlock Holmes stories recently, but that is different, because, in Doyle, crime is incidental to a probing of the nature of reason, and questions about the perfectability of thought, about the nature of cognition, of aesthetics, and of intellectual freedom. Side note: Holmes dispatches his great adversary Moriarty with a modified judo throw -- Holmes practiced a British self-defense style called bartitsu, a mix of judo, jiu-jitsu, wrestling, and stick fighting. Another side note: I remembered that Holmes did cocaine, but never realized how much. A final side note: the passages on Holmes's love of music are beautiful and profound. Holmes is a musician and a love of music, and he seems to use music to deliberately offset the parts of himself drawn to a too-mechanical objectivity and to isolation.

Brokeback Cat Toy

2009-04-24T09:17:00.003-04:00

Earlier this week, it seemed as though my back was nearly healed. I went on a hike over the weekend and taught bjj on Monday night. However, after a 45 minute hike on Tuesday, I felt the brief hitch that seems to signal doom. It is worse now than after the original injury -- yesterday I had to slowly crawl through the house if I needed to use the toilet.

I couldn't walk up the stairs last night to bed, so I slept on the couch, which meant I didn't sleep much because each of the three animals took it in turn to take advantage of my situation. I was jumped on, rubbed against, licked, and patted. This might sound like a kickass porn vid, but it left me cursing the dawn.

*

That's the bad news. The good news is that I set myself a task on Monday: to write every day. On Monday and Tuesday I produced drafts of two short stories. Then, after getting a facebook message from a local filmmaker, I was inspired to work on a script. I lifted a core idea from my second short story and used that to sculpt a basic story. I went online and read webpages about how to build scripts, and I read through a handful of samples.

As the story grew, I began to see it as a dark comedy about a young teenager. I decided it would be mature and without condescension, while at the same time avoiding profanity. This came from my difficulties finding movies to watch with the Dufflebag -- he has a sense that kid's films are somehow beneath him, but the amount of stuff aimed for teens that doesn't involve super duper villains or the ghosts of Porky's is slim. So that's the starting point. I stayed up until three in the morning doing an outline, diagramming conflict, obstacles, characters, all the classic film stuff, just to have a sense of where I was going before I settle in and hope the words write themselves.

For the Bland Mexican

2009-04-14T13:16:00.002-04:00

Writing my review of Felipe's Taqueria left me thinking how much I could go for food with a little heart right now.

Elementary Particles

2009-04-14T08:00:00.003-04:00

I took Jess to Mt. Auburn hospital yesterday for surgery. I figured it would be a good time to visit one of my favorite cheap eats restaurants for the column, but had to leave the car in the hospital garage. Along the way, I needed to deposit a check for Jess that she didn't have time to herself.

I walked all the way to the International Buddhist Progress Society, nearly all the way to Central Square, and found that it was closed on Mondays. Perhaps because my herniated disc forced me to walk awkwardly, I developed large blisters on my feet. I had only enough money for lunch -- I sold a video game at Newbury Comics so I would have enough. No taxi. I walked back, very slowly, all while circling around and looking for a Bank of America. Not an ATM. But a bank.

Finding none, I made it back to the hospital after stopping at an inexpensive but awful little burrito shop in Harvard Square.

I still needed to find a bank, so I got the car out of the garage and started driving. Luckily, I found one in Watertown, and made the deposit, although it required the intervention of the manager. By this point, I couldn't stand up straight because of my back. I was supposed to be lying down but had done nothing but walk or sit since six that morning, when I drove to pick up my mother to babysit the Dufflebag.

I made it back to the hospital and started a series of check-ins on Jess's condition. They continually added more hours to the projected recovery time, so I was worried about her. Despite this, the time moved very quickly. I payed for a large coffee with my remaining change and sat in the hospital lobby. The cleanliness of Mt. Auburn, and the friendliness of its staff, is almost comical. At one point I considered asking the woman at the information desk for a back massage.

The main lobby was nearly deserted, and most people there maintained a respectful silence. This was broken only briefly by the sort of loud mouthed invalid I was expecting to deal with all day, but his ride thankfully showed up and he was on his way without much fuss. I read nearly half of Michel Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles. I've had it lying around for a while and I'm not sure why I picked it up but I can't imagine a more engaging read under the circumstances. It's a book that makes me want to write. With that book, the hours in the lobby passed with none of the normal waiting room feelings of restriction and frustration.

Jess came out tired but in good health, and the surgery went well. The drive home normally takes about an hour, but this took over two, partly because of two accidents on route two, and partly because of delays at CVS: we had to wait inside to file for her pain medications, wait fifteen in the car, wait in the drive through for another ten, find out the meds weren't ready yet, queue up again in the drive through, one more time for good measure when it still wasn't ready, and then finally head off to home.

My mother has the dog under her sweater and was watching Fox news.

I drove her home, printed out some copies of my resume, since we don't have a printer, and ate two nearly raw sausages. I hadn't eaten since my bad burrito eaten eight hours previously and was hungry enough to get them down.

After making another failed attempt to find my R. Crumb's history of the blues book, I drove back home for the final time, where Jess and I started Let the Right One In and got halfway through before falling asleep. Both of us wanted to finish the film -- we were getting wrapped up in it -- but between the drugs and day, there was too much weariness and we couldn't hold off.

I took a razor to my blisters, one of which was filled with so much fluid that it shot, in a stream, three feet across the room. I lay down and my back began to spasm uncontrollably. This didn't hurt, the rapid firing of the muscles, but I had to wait for it to subside before giving in and letting go. Five hours later, I was woken up by repeated attacks on my toes by the cats. Jess was in pain and couldn't sleep, and had moved downstairs to watch the Sex and the City dvds Mac and Ana lent us this weekend.

Back upstairs, one cat would claw at the door, come in, attack the drapes, and leave. Then the other would come in, jump on the bed and start going for the feet.

If I locked them out, they would cry at the door to be let in.

Finally, I just gave in and started reading essays about Michel Houellebecq on the Internet.

Today is for coffee and retreat. That seems fair.

And, Finally, We Move

2009-04-08T15:03:00.003-04:00

Today, I got hired as the area Cheap Eats writer for the Examiner.com. Would you kindly send me information about your favorite inexpensive places in the Boston area? Anyone willing to take me to such places will have favors returned in kind when I start getting comped.

*

Other news: amazon.com has quite a few sampler albums available for free download as mp3s, including those put out by Anti and Sub Pop. Take advantage while you can. With a little searching around, I was able to add a few tunes to the library I'd been looking for, and discovered some interesting new music in the process.

*

Today's New Yorker arrived. That's all for now. Time to read!

Clawing the Corridors

2009-04-08T12:32:00.002-04:00

The herniated disc continues to offer hidden blessings: I spent a lot of time prepping for the MTEL exam again today. Not that the test seems particularly hard, but I still have a nerdy teenager's revulsion at getting a single answer wrong. So I'm doing exercises in my head: name as many conjunctions as you can; define abjure; list rules of capitalization relating to geography. Good, clean fun.

*

Go through a murky, impressionistic part of The Hamlet and am back into what I like most: Balzacian realism, or so the critics call it. The murk made me want to give up, once again, on the old mudmaster, but I'm glad I decided to trudge on and find the jewels that lay beyond: Protestant love confusion, heat, and shady dealings in Frenchman's Bend.

*

Now, I'm off to the store, gingerly. Yes, I know. I'm not supposed to be running around. But I'm under twin imperatives that go beyond hunger. I have to rest up, but I can't let the old carcass just rot either. And I quick trip to the produce section is about as mild an exercise as I might conceive. It's easier than taking a shower, surprisingly, physically, although more taxing in terms of feeling plain helpless. It's tough to go out into the world knowing I could be beaten up by your average eight year old. Damn back.

Couching It

2009-04-07T12:50:00.002-04:00

Today, my back is worse, and it was a big struggle to get out of bed and get the Dufflebag to school. Lots of wallholding.

I stopped with the heating pad and opted for ice packs, which brought some relief: clear but temporary.

Since I've done nothing but lie around trying to heal up, I managed a trip to the store to buy a french press -- I've been using a decades old drip maker that seems to impart a certain unlikeable somethingness to the coffee that makes it hard to stomach. I bought a supercheap press earlier this year at a Chinese market, but the screen falls off the post with every use, making cleaning time last longer than drinking time.

So, I have a french press.

I took the first part of the MTEL practice exam today and am starting to focus on the licensing exam. If I could suffer this back problem at any time, now is it, since it makes it much easier for me to stem my curiosities and stick to the subjects at hand.

Spurs

2009-04-06T09:41:00.002-04:00

It's been three weeks since I started training again. For one of those, I had to stop for a sinus infection. Now, I believe I herniated a disc and can do little more than lie down, shifting for more comfortable positions.

It bothers me, not being able to train, and not being able to go on a short hike yesterday. But even simple tasks like making coffee are difficult. A nuisance. I have considered relating the difficulties that come along with wiping my ass, but suffice to say it takes less time to simply take a shower.

It does give me time to study for the MTEL, which I'm taking in early May, and to read Faulkner's The Hamlet.

I remember struggling with Faulkner when I was younger, and telling Charlie that I just didn't get it. If I remember correctly, he suggested that was astute on my part, and suggested you needed to be from the South to truly "get" Faulkner.

As I read him now, I do get the sense that his writing is all the more vivid now that I spent a short period of time on a farm. The world he describes is still agricultural. Now that I know what "cutting to the quick" really means, a scene with a botched horse shoeing makes more sense. It also seems to accord well with the times: money, food, work. Confidence games. Aspiration. And all told in a prose that is dense and rich.

*

I watched both Monte Hellman's Cockfighter and the bonus Warren Oates biopic this weekend. I'll probably go through the commentary track today.

It is an impressive film, and deserves to be seen by more than just the cinema insiders who are drawn to it. In fact, it worked well alongside Faulkner, in terms of setting and tone, even if I suspect the Charles Willeford novel it is based on is unfaulknerian.

For those of you haven't seen it yet, Warren Oates plays a cockfighter who takes a vow of silence after a drunken, foolish bet makes him lose his chance for the coveted Cockfighter of the Year award, given out by the state Senator despite cockfighting being, at the time, illegal.

It is a basic story: a man torn between love and vocation, but it is also entirely fucked up. His vocation, after all, is disreputable and his ability to maintain meaningful relationships is stunted.

Hellman, at his best, works with simple stories but focuses on the sort of casual but meaningful details that other directors ignore. Watch the movie carefully and you could probably put short spurs on a game cock yourself.

Loose Knots

2009-03-25T13:24:00.002-04:00

Apologies to regular readers. I haven't been on here much.

I started training bjj again regularly, but was sidelined last week with a persistent sinus infection. It has finally loosened its grasp on me, and I took a brief hike this morning in the local state park. It was an easy trail, but one of the most beautiful nature trails I've seen. It runs smack against various streams. There are plenty of bridges and beaver dams and sudden, unexpected, open fields. I wore my knee brace and brought walking poles with me, and my knee hardly seems to have been affected.

*

I finished Charles Portis's True Grit. An old Boston Globe review called it a perfect novel, and I agree. It is precise, warm, witty, and violent. There are enough slight digressions to make it feel human, while the pacing is brisk. Portis really knows how to work the language, how to make the words themselves a source of pleasure. He knows equally well how to give characters nuance and color.

Here's the breathless first paragraph:

"People do not give it credence that a fourteen-year-old girl could leave home and go off in the wintertime to avente her father's blood but it did not seem so strange then, although I will say it did not happen every day. I was just fourteen years of age when a coward going by the name of Tom Chaney shot my father down in Forth Smith, Arkansas, and robbed him of his life and his horse and $150 in cash money plus two California gold pieces that he carred in his trouser band."

This isn't music, so much. But the tension between the sounds of the words is masterful. A reading out loud will help reveal how dense the language is, given its simplicity.

I found myself laughing a lot while reading it. I tried to find some passages to read out loud to Jess so that she might understand, but all that I could find, when read out loud, sounded gruesome.

As Portis might put it, it is that kind of book.

*

My main goals now are to get back in shape and to get my teaching license so that I can start teaching high school English this fall. I am embracing the focus.

Additionally, homelife has been particularly good to me these past few weeks. I am a lucky man.

A walk around the house today reminded me of why we were drawn here. With a little heat and sunlight, the surrounding woods seem to hum. Already, this seems less the drab and dying place of an overlong winter, but a place of color and energy.

At the local state park, I stood alone in a vast field, with a bridge crossed stream on my right side on the mountains on my left. I lay down in the grass and let my sunstarved skin rest in the heat for a few minutes. I didn't feel, as I have recently, like a knot of sore joints. I felt ambitious, and eager to get back to the work of reading and writing.

*

For lunch, I made another various on Mark Bittman's anti-ramen soup, this time adding seaweed. Yesterday, I made it with carrots, celery, galanga paste, lemongrass, and fish sauce, along with the ingredients given in the recipe. It is a quick, easy, tasty lunch, and lends itself to leftovers or, in my case, veggies gone nearly bad.

From Greensides into Darker: A Review of Bonnie "Prince" Billy's Beware

2009-03-18T16:09:00.003-04:00

1. Bonnie “Prince” Billy’s new cd, Beware, was released on Tuesday and is perhaps the most anticipated recording of Will Oldham’s career. For those of you new to his music, I’ll give you the history in short. Oldham was a child actor and continues to occasionally appear in films. He took the photograph for the cover of Slint’s Spiderland album. He started recording under various Palace monikers – Palace Brothers, Palace Music, Palace Songs and, simply, Palace. He records under his own name, as well as under the name Bonnie “Prince” Billy. Famously reluctant to give interviews, Oldham was unexpectedly candid in a recent New Yorker profile. Oldham loves to visit hot springs and reportedly organizes his tours around them. This seems incidental, but if you were to attempt to explain his music to someone who hasn’t heard it before, the feeling of lying in a hot spring might be a good place to start. The music is circular and often spare. His voice is warbly and high, although when you hear him sing with other musicians, its clarity and resonance become apparent. Oldham is known for making his recordings with some of the band members unrehearsed. Sometimes, the musicians don’t hear the songs for the first time until they are actually being recorded.

2. I read something recently that suggested BPB isn’t driving music. When I used to drive a truck for a living, I often found myself hitting fast forward during his songs, even though I very much like them. There have a languid quality that makes the ride feel long and even claustrophobic. This is my first major point about Beware. You can drive to it. There is a steady, churning, insistent quality to the rhythms. BPB often counterpoises anachronism with the utterly contemporary. An example from the back catalogue: a loose, haunting piano waltz played against a drum machine is called, “You Have Cum in Your Hair and Your Dick is Hanging Out.” These counterbalancing tensions are found in other ways, and Beware is full of them: some of the musicians, particularly the backup singers, sound rehearsed and offer perfect, rich harmonies, while others play as though they are improvising. The lyrics are bald and almost uncomfortably honest, but, as with Oldham’s hero Merle Haggard, the precisely autobiographical blends into intimations of the Everyman and the Everyromance. The traveling rhythm I note above at times evokes trains or even wagons, but, on the songs where Oldham seems most inspired by Gram Parsons and Gordon Lightfoot, we are in the world of cars and open highways.

3. In fact, for his apparent archness, lyrically, Oldham seldom strays from basic themes of popular music: mostly sex, but God as well.

4. Few lyricists can be so blunt, and appear so cryptic. Much of this comes from the listener’s inability to determine what is lyrical (in the older sense, with an assumption of insight and autobiography), what is ironic, and what is ballad (again, in the older sense, involving a story). And, outside of the films of Eric Rohmer or the writings of Proust, you won’t likely find depictions of love so decentering. A rowdy song starts off promising for our young lover: “sometimes you like the smell of me or how my stomach jiggles/even if that smell is liquor . . . but you don’t love me.” Our anticipations are thwarted and we are disappointed as well. This man sounded so optimistic! But again, the unexpected: “that’s all right/because you cling to me/all through the night.”

5. Here is Oldham at his most Haggardesque: “I don’t belong to anyone/There’s no one who’ll take care of me/It’s kind of easy to have some fun/When you don’t belong to anyone.”

6. If this is the voice of Oldham or of his inventions, we’re not sure, but through the conflicted love, the lyrics convey a search for purpose: “if I follow the song I hear/will another come near,” “I’ll likely never know/The answer why/You are hello/I am goodbye.” The ambiguities between a personal search for the good life, the search for romance, and the search for transcendent meaning are often answered with a shrug and a turn to work itself, be it creative or otherwise. “Yeah work baby and all good things will gather/love to your buckets, to honor your father/and arms will hold you!”

7. I don’t want to waste time speculating on the title, but I will say this. A close listen to the music and a reading of the lyrics suggest what we might beware of: loneliness, pointlessness, and darkness of various sorts. I would have to imagine that the title adds tension to two words that recur throughout the songs: work and light. Given how prolific Oldham is, it isn't surpising to see work invoked as a stay against confusion. Yet it is clear that this work serves a higher purpose.

8. I also don’t want to waste time speculating on whether or not this will be the recording that pushes Oldham out of the constraints of a cult following into the mainstream. Listeners have known long enough that he belongs among the serious and challenging great American songwriters: Foster, Dylan, Haggard, and Hank Williams. I will say it’s a beautiful album that reveals more with each listen. I suspect it will seem a high watermark in the BPB canon.

Backburners on Fire!!!

2009-03-16T11:48:00.004-04:00

When I left off working on the novel, the inevitable shake-up occured and I've been writing less in all arenas, including this blog. Now, after spending the morning working on applications for teaching jobs, I can at least offer hints of an update.

*

I spent Saturday at a judo seminar at Boston BJJ, and returned home to take Jess and the Dufflebag out for pho. The Dufflebag had never had Vietnamese food before, enjoyed it past measure. Nice to see how he's transformed from having a pickiness so profound that I heard about it before I met him to the current situation, where he's wondering why I'm holding off on frying up the eel housed in our freezer.

*

The new Will Oldham (Bonnie Prince Billy) cd, Beware, comes out tomorrow, and it will one of the few discs in the last five years or so that I'm so excited about that I'll pick up on the release date.

Check back for a review.

*

So, if I haven't been writing, what have I been doing?

Well, the applications are taking up some time. I put in three days of training last week -- about as much as I'd trained in the past three months. The knee feels sore when done, but healed the next day, and that's fine for now. I'm also enjoying bjj again, but I suppose that comes from not having the urgency of the novel pressing on me. It is a happier life without writing, I'll admit, although it feels somehow emptier.

I've continued to listen to music closely and with enjoyment in ways I haven't in years. For the past few days, I've set my ipod to play all my songs by The Fall and my interest is sustained.

*

You might note that there's not a lot of cooking going on. I'm still making dinner most of the time, but exercise, the job search, and a few photo jobs have pushed all that to my crooked little backburners.

The Common Whore of Mankind

2009-03-12T15:52:00.003-04:00

Is Karl Marx the first great intellectual of the twenty-first century?

Christopher Hitchens explains why this may be the case here.

HVAC in the News

2009-03-11T09:46:00.002-04:00

It isn't every day when you read about HVAC workers, particularly people who work on the supply end, so it's interesting to note that Michael McLendon, the Alabama man who murdered twelve people yesterday, not only was a former HVACer but went to two different supply houses while on his spree.

Since a small but significant percentage of the guys I knew in that field seemed capable of such an act, it comes as no surprise to me. This isn't to make light of a horrible situation, but a statement of fact.

Gator, Tater, Sprout Conclusion

2009-03-10T22:03:00.002-04:00

I was more than pleasantly surprised by the fried gator. The best parts were the longer, thinner ones, which tasted very much like fried clams. The thicker ones tasted somewhere between chicken, pork, and tuna. I cooked them in the Fry Daddy after dipping the pieces in eggs and then dredging them in flour with fresh black pepper, salt, a cajun spice mix, and galanga powder.

The Dufflebag went for seconds.

I served it with with roasted potatoes and brussel sprouts, which I cooked with rosemary, paprika, garlic, salt and pepper and dressed in a mustard sauce. A simple dish that I've made before, but it always seems to work well and somehow manages to seem both healthy and hearty. Since I don't watch much tv other than cooking shows, it's nice to be reminded that simplicity is sometimes best. Of course, everyone knows this, but everyone also forgets.

Back to working on applications!

Gators, taters, and sprouts

2009-03-10T12:29:00.003-04:00

I've decided to stop working on the novel this Sunday.

It is driving me nuts, the combination of putting my life on hold while, at the same time, only making the slightest progress with lots of effort. It doesn't mean I'm giving up on the novel, only that I'm putting it on the shelf while I start the job search in earnest. I also need to start exercising again. Imagine a strange, immobile sea creature that rests on the ocean floor, eating bits of stray fishbones and the occasional starfish. That creature? That's me right now.

This doesn't mean I'm done with the novel, only that I'm letting it ferment for a time while I take care of other matters of increasingly vital concern. It also means that I can start acting like a human being again, I hope.

*

I'm going to fry up the alligator I bought, frozen, weeks at SS Lobster and serve it with roasted potatoes and bean sprouts. I'll let you know how it goes.

Half a Loaf of CF

2009-03-10T10:09:00.003-04:00

For the first time since taking up nanny duties, I overslept today, and the Dufflebag was late to school.

Normally, I naturally wake up at the right time, but daylight savings must have thrown me off, and the cats failed in their duties to rouse me. Typically, they go right at my face when it's time to play, but today, perhaps sensing the deepness of my sleeping, they were rolled up at my foot.

And it was a very deep sleep, fueled by camomile and late night writing.

I put his cereal in a bag for a snack and poured him a glass of milk, which he stared at for a few minutes before I finally told him to chuck it.

My car immediately got stuck in the snow, and I had to, on the spot and in a rush, teach him how to drive so that I could push. He ended up doing a good job. It was too difficult and dangerous to explain the rocking technique of rapidly switching from reverse to drive, I had him tap the gas while I pushed as hard as I could.

"Driving is harder than I expected," he told me.

"Well, that's why you see so many bad drivers," I said, slipping into my grumpy old man mode.

The car extracted, the day began.

Fried Feet

2009-03-09T23:15:00.003-04:00

My attempt to capitalize on Charlie's departure as the opportunity to write all hermit-like hasn't quite worked. Because of the snow, school was let out early. And, tomorrow, I have to wait around for a mattress to be delivered. Jess bought one -- the old one is so spent that we dream of sleeping on stormy seas.

But I'm determined to get through this draft. I'm drinking tea and gearing up for another hour or so of editing. TV off. Radio on.

I've been out of money for a few days. For dinner, I sliced some pickles and put them on the sourdough, with mustard and horseradish. Humble and good, but it made me want to eat fried chicken feet.

My tax refund overdue, I checked the IRS website and got an update. They claimed my refund, citing a law that allowed them to do so to if I owed money for child support or to the state or federal governments.

Since I certainly don't owe child support and thought I'd paid all taxes, I was surprised. Surprised, meaning it felt like a brick fell on my head. I needed that money. According to the site, they are sent me a letter today detailing the reasons why my paltry refund got crabbed. We'll see what new joys it brings later this week.

Plant Life

2009-03-09T13:12:00.003-04:00

I've returned home to bake the bread. It didn't rise nearly as much as I hoped. It seems that the crust already hardened too much, even though I liberally coated it with olive oil.

It smells good. I suspect it will taste good. But it won't be what I'm after.

*

The snow continues to fall and it took me forty-five minutes to get back from Fitchburg, not even counting the multiple times I got stuck in Charlie's driveway. Last Monday it snowed, and I couldn't teach. I've been itching to get in and train, but I might have to cancel again.

*

For lunch, I sliced up the rest of the fennel, quartered some radishes, put them on a bed of spinach, and sprinkled the top with a fistful of carrots. This winter has killed me: bad knees, heavy food, lots of sitting down to read and write. I'm trying to switch to eating more plant life. I love eating plant life, thankfully.

I dressed the salad with some thai peanut sauce, combined with rice vinegar. It was luxurious, and I wish I had thought of doing it yesterday, since it easily topped the lousy store-bought yogurt and parmasan gloop we tried.

Cat Sat

2009-03-09T10:00:00.002-04:00

Charlie is away at a conference, so I'm house sitting for him. His skittish cat took to me right away and we're both in the living room, keeping warm from the snow.

I'm hoping that the relative isolation will allow me a half day's concentrated effort on the novel. I've got about three to four hours before I have to pick up the Dufflebag, bake the bread, and head off to teach tonight.

*

Speaking of the bread, I was worried that my sourdough would rise because I went off recipe and substituted wheat for white flour. Supporting my theory that the house has bread goblins that do my work for me when I'm asleep, the dough had risen even more than the white when I checked this morning. A good sign, indeed.

Acid People

2009-03-09T00:26:00.003-04:00

Jess came along on my photo trip today. We ended up driving for six hours -- all the way to the southern part of the state and then back up, getting only slightly lost on back roads, before arriving home to eat a quick spinach and fennel salad before heading out again to pick up the Dufflebag from his dad.

My first sourdough turned out well. The taste was excellent. I forgot to slice the top of the loaf, and suspect it would have risen more if I had done so. I was going to make another batch tonight, but might have botched it. The recipe calls for mostly unbleached white flour, but I ran out, so I had to mix in about half wheat. Wheat flour is lower in gluten, making it harder to rise. The loaf yesterday rose so easily I'm going to have faith in it. I made it at ten tonight so that it will go into the oven mid-afternoon tomorrow. If it turns out well and if you train with me at the school, you may just get a loaf. I intend on giving loaves to those who have helped me out recently as a thank you, but I can only make so many at one time.

I annoyed Jess by talking so much about the sourdough. After going on about the simplicity (just yeast, water, and salt and nothing more) and the taste, the luck I felt for getting it right the first time, the honor I felt at seeing it rise and confirm to expectations, she was ready to hit me with a shoe, I gather, but showed saintlike restraint and I ended the conversation unharmed.

*

While on the road today, we listened to the ipod on shuffle. We stopped for a decent lunch outside of Franklin that looked like a converted barn. I had a reuben. Not the best I'd ever had, but I was hungry. Plus, I was able to avoid ordering the french fries and went instead for the cucumber salad, and that set off a wave of healthy eating, ending with my own spinach salad when we finally got home.

I learned a lesson from the salad.

For the first time in years, I bought a dressing from the supermarket, and it nearly ruined the dish. My original intention was to save time.

Make your own dressing. Say it with me. Make your own dressing.

To take something so pure and delicious and healthy and then pour factory glop on it? Foolish, faltering humanity. And it simply didn't taste nearly as good as vinegar, lemon juice, olive oil, salt and pepper would have.

Jess and I were watching a tv show the other night, and the thought struck me: we're vinegar people. Acid people.

She asked me to explain myself.

Well, there are bases and acids . . . .

She got the point.

And the store bought dressing? Base. Cheese and yogurt. Not unhealthy. Just not tasty. Not light. Not possessing the wonderful, electric quality of a good dressing.

*

Jess sat down to watch the Devil and Daniel Johnston again, since she was so tired she fell asleep the first time. She loved the film, but falls asleep easily.

She fell asleep again, almost at the same part.

She was able to make it through nearly all three hours of Altman's Short Cuts on Friday. Perhaps the best movie ever made that you can call "a great little film" even though it's three hours long.

*

Along the ride, we stopped in Clinton to admire a pen of baby goats, and let them suck our fingers. See flickr.

*

Despite the busy day, I was able to process all the pictures from the weekend, along with some strays I took for my own pleasure, and also rewrite a few paragraphs from my novel. I didn't have a lot of time, but made major revisions. Sometimes, that is enough.

For reading, I abandoned the Nooteboom -- didn't say much to me although I admire it -- and picked up True Grit, a Portis novel I avoid for obvious reasons but it's so damn good it had me wanting to call people on the telephone and read passages to them. I mean. It's really good. Really, really good.

*

Writing, reading, watching good dvds. Making or in the process of making four sourdough loaves. Driving to Manchester, Portsmouth, Franklin, Bridgewater. Playing with goats. Moving furniture. Writing this entry. A full weekend. Bodes well for the week. Snow forecast tomorrow. I don't care. It'll warm up soon enough.

Hi, How Are You?

2009-03-07T23:18:00.002-05:00

Jess was curious about The Devil and Daniel Johnston. I've seen it before.

But not in this context.

I've been driving all over New Hamsphire today.

My friend Rob killed himself in the mid nineties. And one of my last memories of him was driving around New Hampshire, lost, and looking for Durham. We had one tape in the car -- Daniel Johnston -- and we listened to it on repeat and sang along with every line.

It's been a long time, man. Memories ferment, like anything else given the right conditions. But just because something is pervasive, doesn't mean it doesn't have some sort of added weight. A heaviness.

Is it distasteful for someone who aspires to write to cite this? Unspoken bits of matter.

As a human, you learn when to shut your mouth.

Here We Go. Aspire to Greatness. Ready 1-2-3.

2009-03-07T21:11:00.006-05:00

I lost my ability to concentrate on most novels around 93, for complex reasons.

Partially having to do with me, partially having to do with novels.

Is there any other art form that demands so much attention and offers so little reward? Crackers.

But this is what gives me pause. Filtration. Immediacy. Impermanence. Glut. Pipelines. Hyperlinks. Buzz and static.

Maybe, just maybe, such mindframes are more necessary now, even more than in the past. This is what has me thinking. Maybe the problem of being able to sit alone in a room is old, old, old. And maybe we now have a solution, not quite obvious, that has been from us since just after Gutenberg.

At one time, we imagined, language as the house of being. Or we had it imagined for us.

And all that we saw resolved to language, however tentative, however fragile. Even our psychological architecture. Even our architecture. Even the way we cooked our fish.

Now? Ones and zeros. Zeros and ones.

We can't be faulted for at least considering where the escape routes might lie.

I mean.

Can we?

If You Have Ghosts

2009-03-07T19:45:00.006-05:00

My old employer called and hired me to take pictures of all the branches. I met him in Nashua and was reunited with the work truck, which I have all weekend.

After thousands of dollars of repairs, she is retiring and being replaced by a newer model. Since I left, business has been slow, and the odometer hasn't spun much more since I sat behind the wheel.

I spent all day driving New Hampshire, working on the project. Fortunately, the fastest way was slow and off the interstate, and I spent a healthy amount of time looking at cows and listening to Roky Erickson.

The Boss gave me cash for the project, and I returned with a few dollars in my pocket -- more than usual -- but was able to pick up garbage bags, kitty litter, supplies from Home Depot for the house, and a cup of coffee to fuel the journey home.

*

I'm rising dough made with my sourdough starter for the first time. I'm excited: no additional yeast, no sugar, no leavener. Just "the beast," water, and salt. And it's rising, smelling warm and beary. Fifteen hours to rise. Forty five to bake. My timing was off. She's coming out of the oven at midnight. But I'm going to assume that there's something in the house that makes the environment good for baking -- the temperature, the ghosts, the microbes, and I'll respect that spirit and see the project through to whatever hour presents itself.