up nort

Sometimes, after a long year, you gotta get on a plane and fly to a place where summer still exists, where the sky is high and blue and the peonies are still blooming and you think a lot about those Minnesota summers you had in 2004 and 2005 and 2006 and 2007 and it's good to sit at a table outside with very old friends and drink beer and be glad, so glad, that you made it.

glad to know it

We were at AWP Minneapolis last week/end. When we left Georgia, the azaleas were almost done blooming. When we landed in Minnesota, the fields were brown and starting to thaw. It snowed briefly on Friday morning and was sunny and warm enough to eat a picnic outside the convention center on Saturday. Meanwhile, back home, the season had turned from spring to summer. In the four days we were gone, the trees unfurled into full green. 

Driving home from the airport Sunday afternoon, I marveled at the lushness, the closeness of all the foliage. MSP had been a lovely buzz of all the things--reunions with grad school advisors and peers, the release of my prose chapbook Rook & The M.E., breakfasts and beers with former colleagues, closing down the conference on Saturday night reading at a bar--and it was good to see people, good to come back to something that felt equally full.

I found out the week before AWP that I am the new assistant professor of creative writing at this school of ours. This coast--where we've been for the last four years--will be our home for a few more years, it seems. The droop of Spanish moss, the little ferns that wave from the limbs of the oaks. 

This is an adopted landscape, but I'm glad to know it. 

this past weekend

Bockfest!

Yes, those are fake glasses. No, nothing is as douchey as wearing fake glasses at a beer festival in south central Minnesota, particularly one seemingly untouched by irony and populated mostly by burly drunk guys in Carhartts. But somebody has to offset all the deerbonging.

the way forward

Friday night, and the B is sleeping, a late-evening nap that might turn into an extremely early bedtime. He fell asleep one Law & Order, one Bones, and one-half Pretty Woman ago. I've been in the kitchen. Potato salad with herb mayonnaise and hard-boiled eggs. Chocolate chip cookies. A long grocery list for the morning, when we'll go to the store. Earlier, online, I bought a pair of Adidas and a digital kitchen scale.

It's not the most exciting kickoff to the weekend, but it works.

I am stockpiling. I am soothed by our full refrigerator. I am thinking about the spring. I am grateful that even though the temperature is back in the twenties and thirties, there is no snow.

I am humbled and happy that I came home today to a pudding care package, sent from Wayzata. Inside an old Converse All-Stars box was nail polish, my favorite kind, and mix CDs labeled "March ♥s Xtina," and two kinds of pudding, and a green wind-up dinosaur that immediately terrified the dog. In the video, there is something that looks like blood but might be just barbecue sauce on the kitchen tile. 


It's a good day. A good evening. 


*


I received a rejection letter today from a job I applied to in September. This is probably the most inane and nonsensical part of the academic job search--the official notification that you get after after months of silence, after the search committee has done phone interviews and campus interviews and offered a candidate the position and received a signed contract from that candidate. I knew I didn't get this job back in December, when one of my colleagues was invited down for a campus interview. But still, I got a letter.


The letter was signed by the man who used to be my former TA director. Four years after we both left Minnesota, our names have intersected one more time. Because I was in a good mood, because the sun was out, I laughed before I tossed it into the recycling bin.

For the next three or four months, I'll get one of these letters a week. I remember that from Minnesota, from Wisconsin.


*


We have been talking. The future that lies ahead of us is familiar in its unfamiliarity. Like we did in summer 2007, we have no specific prospects or offers ahead of us. 


The Plan B, the one we'd known might be coming, is starting to take its shape.

We are making a list. New York is out. Seattle is tempting, but means a full-on commitment to cross-country flights. We are at the ages when we have to think about the marriages and deaths and births we'd miss. 

Boston is, after some reflection, out. The idea of Los Angeles makes me want to stab myself in the face. We are thinking Philadelphia, Baltimore, Richmond, Atlanta. 


We won't go to Minneapolis, though of course we'll always know people there. I need something different. I want to get out of the Midwest. I should try something that isn't pulling back the curtains and groaning at the sky. 


Three weeks ago, before I had heard the nos from Texas and Oregon and Louisiana, before those doors closed, the idea of Plan B made me tired all over. Bone tired. I wanted the basic decision made for me--We'd like to offer you this position. We could go from there, I knew, could line up apartments and work for the B. 


But something changed in me last week. Now I'm glad for the Plan B. Something about all the nos makes me feel, oddly, in control. For the last two years, I've been sending out letters and CVs and hoping that someone would pay attention to me. Now it's our turn to look at the map and think not Could I live there? but Where do we want to live? 

In this uncertainty, there is great freedom. 


* 


On Wednesday, Liz was here. The B and I, along with two other visitors, were reading on campus. Our contracts are up in four weeks, and we are leaving, so we read our poems and our nonfiction and our fiction. Afterward, a bunch of us went to the bar around the corner, and we ate burgers and drank beer and laughed.

Liz followed me to the bar from campus, and as we parked our cars down the block and walked, she mentioned looking for jobs in Atlanta. 

Atlanta? I said. We hadn't talked in a few weeks; we'd been busy.


I have to get out of Michigan, she said. Maybe Atlanta. Maybe Chica--

The wind--cold, bitter--took the go out of her mouth for her. 


Fuck Chicago, I said. I mean, it seems like a great city, but fuck this weather. We went into the bar, where the fake fireplace roared in the corner. 


Later, we sat in the living room and listened to Joe Purdy, ate blondies and talked. We talked about the dues we still might pay. We talked about adjunct pay and piecing together full-time work and what it's like to be in our thirties and not have insurance. We talked about the current national rhetoric regarding teachers. We talked about the future, and the cities we could see ourselves living in, respectively, and the conversation felt just like the ones we used to hold in the red living room of the house in Minnesota, and it felt good. 


*


We have been thinking of Atlanta. There is the weather, the proximity to family, the number of two-year colleges, the IKEA, the four-hour drive to Savannah and Tybee and the beaches, the dogwoods, the aquariums, the population, the opportunities. There is the fact that our proxy--my brother--could help us find an apartment, and, in a pinch, be sent to check it out. There is the knowledge that no matter what the year ends up throwing at us, we could invite over at least one person for dinner on a Wednesday night . 


Nothing is settled yet, and nothing can be--before the great apartment search and job search can begin, we need to finish the semester, and go to Vermont, and go to Wisconsin for our respective residencies, and begin to pack up this place. We need to say goodbye to Michigan. And there is always the slim chance that the school I applied to this week, or last, might call.  

In the meantime, I make potato salad with the parsley from the window box. I make cookies for freezing. I make a grocery list. I think of Atlanta, and I feel good.

so this is christmas: midwest edition

Subtitle: So this is what happens when we forgo the Buffalo/East Coast roadtripping, and instead head over to Minnesota for some pre-Christmas pregaming, and we drink bourbon and Michelob Golden Draft Light, and we all take turns wearing a pair of black-framed glasses that make us look like James Wright, and we watch four hours of Music Choice television and make fun of every band's photo, and we eat cookies, and we meet a dog named Lenny that we are convinced talks shit in a Jersey accent and has Korea flashbacks, and we say PAAAAAAHNCAKES six thousand times in five hours, and then we drive up to Washburn for a few days, and then we drive home through Chicago and manage to avoid even a single snowstorm as the East Coast gets pounded.

what it is like

This book of mine arrived fifteen days ago. A beautiful Friday morning. House to myself. Floors to be swept. I set out for an orchard, thinking I'd buy a doughnut and some cider, maybe pick my own and take fartsy photos of apples.

The apples were overpriced, the pick-your-own section was closed, and I was not hungry for doughnuts. I sighed. I went to Meijer. I bought a tiny flat iron and kale.

At home, the mailbox was filled with Friday mail: Red Plum coupons. I dragged the kale into the house. I crumpled up the coupons and cursed my neighbors for filing the foyer with leaves. Had I not looked down at the leaves, I would have missed the small pink slip. I had a package, held for delivery. The sender was Spire Press.

I glanced out the front door, saw the mail truck packed halfway down the block, dropped my kale, and ran. I didn't make it.

I came inside and thought. The package would be available for pickup at eight the next morning, which meant that the package would be dropped off that evening, after the daily round. On Fridays, the post office is open until seven.

I told myself not to get my hopes up, and then I counted down the minutes until six-thirty, and then I got in the car and went down to the post office.

The woman there looked at my pink slip and said, Oh, this won't be in until tomorrow and I said, I know, I was just hoping that maybe, somehow, I could get it a day early and she said, Well, let me check and when she came back from the storeroom she was holding a small box in her hand.

I took the box to the parking lot, which is right on the Grand River, and I posed very carefully with the box held triumphantly aloft, and I made a joke about dropping the still-unopened box into the river, and then I almost did drop the box, and then I drove home.

At home I opened the box. It was the first twenty-five copies of the book, along with the prize money check, along with a very kind note from my editor that said Congratulations! You have a book.

I felt sort of woozy, and I took the top copy off the stack and said This will be mine (the corner was dog-eared and dinged), and then I closed up the box and pushed it under the dining room table. Then I put the book on  my desk, and posted a few pictures on Facebook, and shut down my computer and shut my office door and didn't look at either for the next two days.

*

On Saturday morning, the next day, I ordered a pair of boots online. They arrived a week later. Then, before I could wear them, I rammed my foot into the Senator's marble fireplace and ripped my toenail almost-but-not-really off, into a hinge, and tonight I sit at my desk and look at the poetry boots I have yet to wear and tell myself it's not a metaphor.

*

Listen, I told each of my classes. I am not good at this sort of thing, so I will tell you this once: my book is now available. I'll be doing some readings in the next few weeks. If you're interested, catch me anytime before or after class. End me talking about the book. 

My afternoon freshmen were ecstatic. They wanted to see the book. They wanted me to tell them the story behind the title and read them one, two, three poems.

They made me feel better. That Monday, I sailed from the classroom.

*

I remembered what the B told me in April 2008, the day I came home from Atlanta and told him the news. We were sitting in the car in the Milwaukee airport parking lot.

Listen, he said. You know that a book doesn't change anything. You are still you. You are a writer, with or without a book. We had spent the fall and winter editing his manuscript, sending it back and forth from Madison to Moorhead.

I looked out the window at the planes taking off and landing. I know, I said. 

*

I thought about this first book interview, given by a poet whose first book I love. I remembered the first weeks of spring at the marketing firm, after I got back from Atlanta, spending my afternoons reading all one hundred and four interviews. I thought I would be at the firm forever, or for a few more years. I remember laughing out loud at this part:

Honestly, the only thing that's really changed is the book has lent a sort of legitimacy to my self-loathing, which was otherwise hazy and unfocused. It really is ridiculous to be googling your own name every day, in quotes, with the word poetry beside it, hoping to pop up in some blog that maybe 15 other people in the world read. 

I only did that for the first six months. Now I'm down to once a week.

I loved that part. I tell myself now to remember that part.

*

At the end of week, the box was still under my dining room table. On that Saturday night, eight days later, we went out for the B's birthday. We sat outside on a warm night under a mural of unicorns and dinosaurs and penguins and I drank PBR pints and three of us there argued about the right way to give an academic job interview. Later we switched to brandy, and we traded socks, and we stayed up far too late.

*

I have been thinking about what I want to tell you, about what it is like. I know that I'm lucky to have this book. I know that somebody reading this is sitting on their first book. I don't mean to be a jackass.

It is like this: you are pregnant, and for all those months you get to tell people that you are having a baby, and everyone is excited for you. And then one day you have the baby and everybody says Congratulations and then they go home to their lives, and you and the baby sit in the dining room and you say, So, you're here, and the baby says, Yup. So now what?

It is not at all like having a baby. I'm being a jackass.

But it is weird, strange, surreal.

*

I had the first official reading last Thursday. I realized the morning of that I would be able to read out of the book. I needed a set list. I made one. I flagged the pages with Post-It notes because I although I know the order I am not used to flipping the pages while I read, and then I got to the venue and realized there was no podium and I would have to hold the book at an awkward angle out in front of me, and my shoes made me way too tall considering I was already up on a giant platform six feet above everyone else, and my voice kept cracking, and I felt like a total asshat.

Before the reading, as I was settling at a table with Liz and making small talk with the bookstore organizer, I looked up to see Darren striding toward me, and my brain misfired all its synapses, and one side said, Oh, look, Darren is here and the other side said DARREN LIVES IN MINNESOTA and the other half said Yes? and the other side said THIS IS NOT MINNESOTA THIS IS MICHIGAN and finally the whole brain started to piece it together and it took every ounce of my being to not shout in a quiet bookstore in this conservative corner of this state HOLY FUCKING SHIT WHAT THE FUCK ARE YOU DOING HERE?

And then other people came and filled in, and one of my students and his girlfriend camped out at the bar, and other people and their wives listened to me and every time I looked up I made eye contact with someone who was either an old friend or a new friend or a total stranger who was engaged and listening and not just flipping through a picture book labeled Treehouses: Castles in the Sky.

So if my voice cracked and my right knee wouldn't stop trembling, I think it may be because my brain was still shouting HEY SHITHEAD PEOPLE REALLY CARE ABOUT THIS THING OF YOURS SO MAYBE PULL YOUR HEAD OUT OF YOUR ASS AND BE HAPPY, REALLY HAPPY, ABOUT THIS BOOK.

I am. I think.

I am.

*

During my first months in Michigan, as I ran by the old houses in my neighborhood, I would think about what to write in each book. What to write at readings, and what to say to the people who were kind enough to lend words to the back cover. I spent the most time thinking about what to write in the books that would go to the people who know me best, who I wrote the book for.

I am sure I had many answers, but now I don't remember any of them.

*

This book is old. The poems are old. I wrote them looking out the windows and seeing the same trees: maple out front of Highland, locust out my bedroom window at Highland, elm out the window of the office in Madison.

These poems are ghosts. They make me think of Minnesota. They make me miss our old bar. They make me miss sneaking over to print them off in the TA office during the evening on Saturdays. They make me miss the last spring in Highland, the one where we opened all the windows and made fruit salad and dared each other to drink the last of the case of Blatz and then, one by one, packed up our things and drove off the cities we would leave each other for.

The newest poem in that book was written in November 2007. I know some people send out manuscripts for years, making the rounds, and I want to ask them how they do it, how once the book finally appears they can go back to that past and read its poems.

Every time I open this book, I feel like I've been strapped in a rocket ship, a one-way ticket back to the person I used to be, the one I still miss sometimes.

*

I know people say enjoy it, that you only get one first book. I know that a book matters and does not matter at all. I know. I know.

I am telling you this because it seems important that I tell you this. It seems important that I write down that this is what was it was like.

The first book interviews have been very helpful. But some make me want to curl up, get in the rocket ship and go back and do it all over again. Those writers expound on the necessity of publishing with the right first press and winning the right first contest. I worry about the production values and the fonts and the page numbers and the layout. I worry about the readings and the contacts I don't have and will not make. I worry. I worry.

I know it doesn't matter. Listen, I tell myself. This does not matter.

It matters, and it does not matter.

*

I bribed myself today. I told myself to get to Meijer and buy big envelopes and thank-you notes and start mailing out the copies I need to mail out.

Then I told myself that if I went to Target, I could buy myself some new pants while I was at it.

Then I bought a flannel shirt because it was impossibly soft and because yellow and white are my new favorite color combination.

Then I talked myself out of buying a big bottle of bourbon.

Then I went home, sat at my desk, and signed eight books and wrote eight notecards. I saved my parents for last, and to both of them I wrote: Some of these poems are about dogs, and some are about gin, and some are about family, and none of them are meant to wound. 

Then I sealed up the envelopes.

*

I sold a book to a man who said I really enjoyed that reading. Would you sign this for me?

I sold one to a student, who e-mailed me the next day and wrote:

I wanted to thank you for the opportunity to see your poetry reading. I haven't been to anything like it before and I loved the atmosphere. I've never really liked poetry before your class and I think I'm finding myself to like it. 

and I wrote back

I know. I was the same way about poetry. 

There were copies on Amazon, and now they are out of stock.

I told my brother I'd send him a copy, and he told me that he'd rather buy one from the press.

A colleague asked me to visit her class, and I sent along some poems for the class to read ahead of time, and on the day of the visit I was walking down the hallway toward the classroom and stopped to check my watch because I was early, and as I stood there I became vaguely aware of something familiar, and then I realized that my colleague was reading my poem aloud to the class, and I stood outside the door grinning like an idiot as she pronounced leishmaniasis without stumbling like I always do.




How can I worry, when this is all that matters?

up nort

Monday
We pack the suitcase and head north. The bridge appears on the horizon like something mythical.

Water water everywhere.

The peninsula is lush and green and sparse, though RVs clog the highway. I remember the thrill of passing cars on the left, the calculated timing and the quick whuzz of acceleration. We watch the sun set behind a hill, sleep in Marquette.

Tuesday
No one is home in Wisconsin--the house in the woods is ours for the night. The dogs run in the field. I see my first blood-swollen tick, plucked from the pointer's shoulder. At the town's pizza parlor, pints of Heineken are $2.65. Later, we drink lemon and Leine's on the back deck and see the lights across the bay.

Wednesday
A bear crosses Highway 2 ahead of our car. Broad daylight, mangy fur.


In Superior, the view is Duluth, sprinkled on the green hills across the lake. I see where the B used to live--the house the only residential building on the block of bars. Further down the street, toward the bridge, the buildings are spaced every-other, the missing bricks burned or bulldozed or simply crumpled in a weeded pile.

Watch the lift bridge go up and down and up again. Boats loaded with ore and beet feed pellets groan their way back out to open water. People in bright shorts pick their way along the rocky shore. The bridges are named for WWII air pilots.

Thursday
I don't understand these small towns, the way everyone recognizes everyone even years later. Younger brothers and old school teachers and cousins all know each other. Even when waistlines and hairlines and tan lines change, something in the eyes must stay the same.
 
Friday
Every five years, this town hosts an open Homecoming--all classes come back and meet each other near the fire hall, where it smells like broasted chicken, and downtown, outside the purple-and-orange bar.

We trek into town, buy cans of beer, sit on the curb outside the bar. The bartender is the school janitor is the kid who never finished high school is the guy who once threw the B's baseball gear onto the roof of the school is the guy who was dumped into a Dumpster by the B's older brother and friends.

A first this year: phone reception in town. The smart phone and I find a friend of a friend from my Kato days. We used to sing karaoke in a cop bar in the Cities; tonight, we stand outside and drink beer smuggled in pockets and shout that it's so good to see each other, that it's been so long, that it's so crazy he and the B are from the same town.

The B runs into people from high school, who are drunk and loud and mock-angry that he's never come back home. You're just here because it's fucking Homecoming! one shouts, then shakes my hand and says It's really nice to meet you.

Saturday
We are back to Marquette. In the evening, I take the dog down to the city park and see a tall ship coming in. When it blows the horn, the dog flattens his ears.

On its way to dock, the ship passes so close that people reach out and touch its varnished hull.

Sunday
Back over the bridge. Below deck, I see the park where my family once stopped for a photo and my brother threw up a pound of Skittles. I miss my chance to eat a pasty.


I am glad to be back home in our city, which seems huge in comparison. Maybe it's grown in our absence. The grass is long, but the pillows are just right, and summer wants me to know it's still got a month left.

lucky life

Ahhhhhhhh. Seventy degrees and climbing. There are plants on the patio. The summer course is sailing along. My spine feels as if it's finally--weeks and months later--unkinking itself.

Every now and again in a life, the present feels like the past. When everyone moved out of this house last summer, making me the senior resident by default, it felt exactly like the end of the first year in Minnesota. Right now, at the end of the second year in Michigan, it feels like--what else?--the second year in Minnesota.

Early summer 2006. It had been a rough year. I felt as if I hadn't slept in months and months; in part, because I hadn't slept well in those months, since our downstairs neighbors threw keggers every weekend. But also because the year had been hard in ways I hadn't expected it to be. I was brittle at the beginning of that summer. I was tired and achy and I just wanted to hole up in the backyard with a stack of books and not talk to anyone for a long, long time.



Ever since my birthday, which was a lovely, buzzy celebration of the end of the semester, I've been (mostly) quiet. I've been drinking coffee on the back patio and watching squirrels run along the back fence, and I've been walking down to the library and checking out books, then reading them and returning them for others. The summer course, even with the changes I've implemented, basically runs itself, and so I find myself with lots of hours on my hands. And these hours are luxurious and lazy.



In March and April, I was communicating somewhat regularly with a small college in a Midwest state (one I haven't lived in yet) about a tenure-track creative writing job. In an economy like this one, and with a market so saturated, I was fortunate just to be one of the finalists. Ultimately, they chose to offer the position to someone else, and a part of me is relieved--suffice to say that it raised questions about geography. I don't know that I'm cut out to be a resident of a county whose tallest building is an abandoned grain elevator.

On the other hand, hello. It would have been a TT CW job offer. So now it looks like we do have at least one more year here on the mitten, and another year of hunting and applications ahead of us. But we also have a summer in which we do not have to move, and instead there are manuscripts to be finished and books to be read and friends who drop by with bottles of something clear and brown.

So it goes.

Already the memories of the last months--broken feet and leaking ceilings and tough crowds--are fading. I had my first Blizzard of the season today. There are new plants on the patio--big herbs with big scents. There are repurposed mustard jars filled with strawberry-jalapeno jam in the fridge. There is a dog who runs into the house with grass clippings clinging to his legs, and there is his rock warming in the sun. There are two weeks until I drive over to Minnesota, and five until I join my family on the Outer Banks.

And sometimes, when we are sitting out back eating our eggs in a baskets, we are joined at that little table by the coolest dog in the whole neighborhood.



Lucky life.

a question of geography

It might actually be the end of winter here. The only snow that remains is the huge gray piles on the curbs, and I spent yesterday in the backyard, cleaning up litter and wishing I had a rake. I have even heard rumors of crocuses--whispered to me by the snowdrops in the side yard.

This time of year makes me want to be on a campus, the sort of place where the first fifty-degree day finds people throwing open windows (and occasionally, throwing up out of windows) and wearing t-shirts a week early and trying to arrange a picnic on a patch of mud. This is not the only place where people celebrate spring, of course--there is also the first Saturday morning at the farmers market, and the gloveless runners in the evening, and ask Bob Hicok about the men who elope with daffodils--but a college campus tends to have a high concentration of this sort of behavior in the first days of spring.

I think of campuses, too, because I spent seven years on two campuses that were pretty good at this sort of thing. Actually, my undergraduate campus was great at this sort of thing. It was the kind of small state school that attracted wanna-be hippies and disc golfers and folks who read Kant while smoking cloves and sitting on concrete benches. Last fall I went back to that campus and immediately I smelled cloves, and it rocketed me back to my junior year of college, walking over to my evening writing class, most likely wearing some ridiculously oversized pseudo-hippie sweater, since that was my uniform back then.

Cloves are my madeleines, I suppose.

I could say a bunch of other trite things here about spring and renewal and fresh starts as well--so let's pretend that I just did--but really, this is the time of the year that I always start thinking about where the next year will find me. Right now, this week, it's hitting me pretty hard. There are a few reasons for this: I'm closing out the second year of my three-year contract, I spent the weekend in the city where I used to live, snowdrops, etc. Whatever the reason, I have woken up the past few days and thought: What's coming next?

In approximately one year, I'll have to decide where to go next. This is the sort of topic that comes up frequently in my head, to the extent that it's really more appropriate to refer to it as Where to Go Next. Sometimes the WTGN game is a fun one that I play, driving through yet another pseudo-snowstorm on the way to teach a ten o'clock class that will be half-full, or when I'm eating in a restaurant around town and see one family with a brood of mixed-race children that have been adopted and brought to this corner of the mitten to be saved by Jesus*.

Other times WTGN is something that sneaks up on me and gives my heart a quick squeeze in its fist--Hey! Having a good time? Don't get too comfortable! And sometimes, lately, it's a game that runs constantly and quietly in the background when I am doing the laundry and driving around town and working on poems and thinking about lesson plans. In other words, of late, the WTGN game has been a constant lurking presence. Even when I think I've turned it off, it's still there.

WTGN, as it turns out, would make an excellent OS.

The other thing about the WTGN game is that it pits the two halves of my brain against each other. The business-writing side, the one that likes to copy edit and spend long periods of time considering the organizational hierarchy of the fridge, wants to make an Excel spreadsheet and devise various categories--things like Proximity to City of 500,000+, Distance to Major Airport Hub, Miles From Family, Time Zone, Approximate Career Satisfaction Rating, Average Length of Winter--and plot various cities or areas of the country, then cross-references those cities against city demographics. And sure, while I'm at it, let's just toss in the rankings from Richard Florida, and research tour stops from a couple of really, really great bands, and see what the average ticket out of this city might cost.

The other side of my brain says, Wow, this is hard. You should probably eat a big wedge of Gouda and then lie down for a bit. I'm sure one day soon you'll have this really profound, transcendental moment in which the answer will come to you. Most likely on the wind, or in the way a strange dog wags its tail.

Fuck my brain.

I know the answer lies someplace in the middle, that demilitarized zone that occasionally produces a coherent thought. I know that too many factors are Xs right now--will there be a job offer? will it be a job that promises to be really, really rewarding? how comfortable am I exchanging that sort of fulfillment for geographic uncertainty? what sort of money will I have? because a decent salary can pay for a fair number of tickets out of a place--and that too many Xs, however disconcerting to me in the short term, mean that I can't make any major decision. And what happens to plans made too early, anyway? They get upset. Things happen. Shit happens. Sometimes even good shit.

Sometimes you are hanging out in the apartment, having another mild panic attack and wondering if you should renew your lease, and then the phone rings and a grad program is offering you a bunch of money if you come to Minnesota. Or you are walking out of a job you don't like and the phone rings and someone on the other end wants to give you a job. Sometimes you are in Atlanta, wandering around a garden with your brother, and someone calls to say that they would like to publish your book, if that is okay with you. There is no way that it makes any sense for me to spend the four days of spring break I have left wondering if some university I've never heard of yet will have an opening a year from now**. That is the definition of crazy.

And yet. Have we met.

This is a letter to myself, really, and here's what I need to tell myself. I will probably be here one more year. I will have classes to teach for the next two semesters and one summer session. If my friends here leave, I will make new friends. One day I will probably leave here too. Then I will find someplace new to live. I will miss the friends who don't live in the same town or state. I will make friends who live in the same town or state. If I live in that place for a long time, I will probably shift all this crazy to worrying whether or not that is the "right" place to live for a long time. I will debate the meaning of the words community and home as I do the laundry and drive around town and write poems. And when spring comes around, and the windows are open, my thoughts will turn to the places I've lived, or want to live, and I will go to the store and buy myself some Gouda and maybe some tulips and try to be happy where I am, for however long I happen to be in it.

It is all I can do.


*this is a gross overstatement about western Michigan. It is also often resoundingly true.
**and this is considering teaching positions. Don't even open the jar labeled Maybe I Should Go Back to CC and Study Graphic Design. That bottle is for emergencies only.

home and home and back home again

Wednesday
My seatmate wants to know if I've ever been to Minnesota.


I'm reading poems, making notes, until my pen explodes mid-flight and ink stains my fingers. When we land, I make a happy noise. I remember these fonts, the French Meadow bakery, the giant moose. I ride down 169 in a Honda with a bumper sticker that says I'd Rather Be Reading Faulkner.

This town smells exactly the same. I take a picture of the hotel room for my father.


I haven't eaten since Michigan, so I buy Chex Mix. The machine flashes YOU ARE A WINNER and gives me a John Tyler gold dollar coin instead of a nickel.


There cannot be anything--anything--quite the first time you walk into a classroom to find nine people sitting in a circle, discussing your poems. My former thesis advisor is beaming. So am I. "It's so good to see you here!" he keeps saying. "It's so great to be here!" I keep saying.


Holy shit, people are asking me questions about my craft. I refrain from telling them I don't own a sailboat.


We head to the Pub for dinner. I have porter and pub chips. I think about all the times that P and Jeano and I would berate the B for not bringing us home any chip dip. "IT IS JUST MAYO AND CAJUN SEASONING," he would tell us. "EQUAL PARTS. DUMP AND STIR."


Back in my hotel, I finish my comments on poems for tomorrow. Jen pulls in and we go to buy wine, making sure that they have twist-off caps. We listen to Sam Cooke and drink from plastic cups. We use the John Tyler dollar to buy chocolate-covered pretzels, and they are the best I've ever had.


Thursday
On my way out of the hotel, I realize there is a breakfast bar. I make a waffle sandwich and walk to campus, careful not to spill syrup on my wool pants.


The department secretary remembers me, asks after the B.


After the conferences, I am introduced to the other alumni readers. We walk over to the radio station. We all know the way. I read on air the first poem I ever wrote in Minnesota. It is about turkeys.


We have lunch and I feel dizzy. I walk back to the hotel and iron my pants.


Darren slips into the craft talk and it is all I can do to keep from yelling Youmadeit! The audience asks us how we each go about composing poems and who we read and what life after the MFA is like. I do mention that I used to keep a list in my cube of poets and their shitty day jobs.


Dinner at the Chinese place and the wontons are actually better than I remember. On the way back to campus, we see Jen and Jean having a drink at the bar. "God," I say. "Remember how easy it used to be to find people in this fucking town?"

I read first. I try to rock it. The podium mike is flopsy and can't be moved. But I pronounce Leishmaniasis properly and dark bars like a Minnesotan.


After the reading, people come up. They want me to know there is a disease that is worse than Ebola, that they liked the McGoff's poem, they cheered at the Sabres reference, that they used to fill their car with fellow high schoolers and drive to the world's largest ball of twine rolled by one man. I love them all.


Dodge has red hair. She has not brought me a puppy as threatened. I tell her I know it's her car because it is covered in road dust.


At the afterparty, we sit on the floor and eat hummus and I remember where the beer's kept. Boots arrives. "Where to next?" he says. "Take me a bar I never knew existed," I say, "because that is what you do best." He thinks for a moment. "Okay," he says, "we're going to Mac's."

We are the only people in Mac's. We drink beer and shatter the naked lady picture find high score and make Boots tell the best story he has in his arsenal. It is about a girl named Sheila, and it is in no way dirty.


There are not one, but two, barber chairs in this bar. Over the cash register are three framed 8 x 10s of a yellow Lab. It has ducks in its mouth.


We go to Pub and order chips. People I used to wait tables with come in. At the after-afterparty, Darren and I invent a clever game we call The Douchebag Game: someone names a song, and we sing it by changing part of the lyrics to the words douche or douchebag. We lie on the floor and play this game for about an hour, singing "Douchin' on Empty," until it is time to go to Perkin's and watch a very funny and skinny man named Adam eat a Tremendous Twelve.


I watch Adam balance an entire egg on his fork and maneuver it into his mouth. At the other end of the table, his friend confides in Jen: he loves his fiancee, but she loves hog farming. "The smell," he says.


Friday
When I check out of the hotel, the St. Cloud State girls' hockey team has taken over the lobby. They are very blond.





Our old house looks exactly the same, which is to say it looks nothing like the place where we used to live.


We drive up 169. "When we get to Jordan," I say, "I am going to eat a corn dog I buy at a gas station."


I buy my corn dog. I eat it wearing a crown I find in the parking lot. Jean and I look at her car. "HOLY SHIT," Jean says, "LOOK AT MY FUCKING TIRE." We do. It is very flat.

Twenty minutes pass. Jen is trying to get a plastic cap unlodged from the tire iron. Jean and Darren are reading the instructions that come with the jack. I am trying to look helpful. Two guys in work boots finally approach us. "Uh," one says. "Do you maybe need a hand?" His friend gets down by the tire, next to Jean, and his hands are suddenly busy with lug nuts. The other stands next to us and spits. He has excellent aim.


The spare is on. The guys refuse money and amble away, talking about Ricky and his spreader and all the fucking work they want to get done in the garage today.


At Jen's, Jean and I proceed to explain inside jokes from grad school. This takes about three hours, but we are sitting on the balcony in the sun and drinking coffee and it is exactly what we should be doing.


"Lucy," Jen says to her cat. "Do not poop on the rug." "Mmmmehhhhhrrrr," says Lucy. She seems angry.


Jean and I go out to lunch and eat our weight in queso dip. We name our new band "Eskimo Pedophile." She tells me about the videos that her high school students quote during class, and we go back to Jen's and watch stuff on YouTube for two hours. Then we put on aviators and fake mustaches and take 242 pictures of ourselves.

We get to Uptown. Mini corn dogs are $2.50 for a basket and all drinks are two-for-one. I drink diet Coke and watch all the cool kids do their thing. We go to another place, this one crawling with hipsters. Darren and I begin to generate squares for our new great idea, the LATFH Bingo board. I say Any eyeglasses that you would have hated when you were ten but now insist on wearing. He says Tweed caps. I say Ascots made from bandannas.


Darren says People who sit in bars making fun of everyone else in the bar and I say Meta-touché!


On the way home, we listen to "John Allyn Smith Sails" and Jen and Darren promise me that next time they will take me on the Berryman tour. "Good," I say, "because it will be February and particularly appropriate."


Saturday
We are in search of pancakes, a copy of Drop Dead Gorgeous, and a bookstore. We find all three, though it takes us four different stores to get the movie. The pancakes, however, are excellent.


We make Jen watch Drop Dead Gorgeous. "Holy shit," she says. "This movie is AMAZING."


Jeano has to leave. "I like to take the Sunday paper from my folks," she says. I tell her to wear her seat belt.


Jen and I order pizza, listen to music. We start Heathers, but I can't finish it. I have never been so tired in my entire life. I crawl into bed and sleep is like falling off a cliff.


Sunday
"John Allyn Smith Sails" is playing as Jen drives me to the airport. "How many times have we listened to this song this weekend anyway?" she asks.


The plane is nearly empty. I move to the window and see the runway blur beneath it, and then the place lifts, and I am going home.

story, conflict, dialogue

I'm taking a little break for a while. I am packing my bag for the reading in Kato town, and I am reading poems. I am trying to figure out what to tell my creative writers about story and conflict and dialogue at a time when everything in my personal life is story and conflict and dialogue, and I am so, so tired.

I am also trying to figure out the best way to physically prevent myself from not wandering over to the house where I used to live--and not standing in the middle of that old street and not looking in the windows of the living room where we all used to drink wine and scream Rod Stewart songs and not crying until my fucking face slides off--this coming Thursday. Perhaps it will involve rope, perhaps it will involve Master Locks.

I am trying to figure out where to go the weekend after, whether I should stay here or get myself to Pennsylvania. All I can think is that at this time last year, I was wearing a new fleece and running almost every day. I was listening to Jason Anderson's "First Snow of the Year" and feeling warm and independent and okay.

And now I feel none of those things. Or, to borrow lines from Bob Hicok's "The Maple":

The story
here is that all morning
I've thought of the statement
that art is about loneliness
while watching golden leaves
become unhinged.

So I'm not going to be here for a while, and I will see most of you pretty soon, and let's just talk then. Oh boy should we ever.

brief encounters with short men

We are amazed how hurt we are.
We would give anything for what we have.

-- from "Jet," T.H.

Last night I was wearing a new orange coat and a gray sweater, standing in the lobby of a building downtown. Across the river, in the office buildings, lights were burning yellow and orange. The chairs and table on the bridge were spotlighted. The room was warm, and we were huddled in little circles, talking about the poetry reading that had just let out, one that was loud and funny and heartbreaking, one that brought the house down.

There were fruit platters and free drinks and a piano player somewhere around the corner. And I was standing there, holding my beautiful broadsides and my books, and all I could think was, What the fuck has happened to me. Where is my goddamned head, and where has it been, and can I please get it back before I completely implode.

I feel so distant these days from the person I was last year. I feel tired all the time, and lonely, and more often than not I get through each day by breaking it into tiny little pieces, until it's time for bed, where I curl up and watch bad television until I fall asleep. And then a few hours later I wake up--jolted awake like something shot from a cannon, and my mind is racing like I've been drinking espresso since eight p.m. It screams at me that my students hate my class, that I am a bad teacher, that I should never, ever give anyone any advice because I have no idea what I am doing in any arena of my own life. And this lasts for an hour or two or three, until I can bury my face back into the blankets and fall asleep for a few hours before the sun rises and it's time for another day of feeling like an absolute zombie.

I know that it has been a crazy few months, that summer came and brought things I was perhaps not expecting--reacclimation, and a wedding, and a broken foot, and an extra class. I know that I am not the only person right now who is going through something bumpy and rocky, that many of us wake up every day and think, Well, this is different. Let's just get through the day, huh? I know that I need to reclaim the things that I used to find so beautiful about this town, back when it was just me and a dog learning our way around.

I know that there are chemicals at work in my brain that are also finding their way, and that I need to be patient.

I have, as of yesterday, been given the go-ahead to wear running shoes and take short walks, and I know that I need to go back to my old ways, when I would wake up and tell myself that I needed to get out of the house and go do something. And I am trying. I can see some lights, I think, at the end of the long road I've been traveling, and I am making changes to my schedule so that I don't find myself looking at everything and thinking Blechhhh.

Last night I watched the poets, and I thought back to--where else?--Minnesota. It was in Minnesota that I first met one of them, the one that is my all-time favorite poet, the one whose lines run through my head nearly every day. After the reading, I stood in line to meet him, he of the short stature and the vests, and we chatted for a few minutes: about Simon Armitage, and about Kato, and about the time we met in 2005, sitting in a tiny room in that old building. He told me that he hoped that conference had gone well, and I told him that it had been one of the best moments of my writing life, that he had read through some poems and asked me where my voice was, and that I had since found it. Or I think I have.

And something uncurled in my chest. When I walked away, as I made my way to the lobby, I thought: I am so tired of feeling like I do, and like I have. I want to be happy here again.

So here I am. I am packing papers that need to be graded into an old messenger bag, and I am wearing familiar shoes, and I am heading to a coffee shop named for a bird. And after that I am going to walk the wet sidewalks of this neighborhood and remember this time last year, when I would end each day with a run and wave to folks arranging cornstalks and pumpkins on their porches. I want to feel like a citizen again, and I want to cross the campus filled with a sense of purpose and wonder. I want to write five new poems, puzzle the words and nudge them into the right lines. I want to go out tonight with the friends we've made and drink dark pints and laugh. I want to be here now. I want my voice back.

And so here I go.

back to school

And so the summer draws itself to a close on a Sunday evening. I'm in the same building in the same city, wearing a Minnesota sweatshirt because it is sixty degrees. The warm weather will be back, but it's nice to cover up for a few hours. And wearing this shirt always makes me think of Kato. I could almost be back in the red living room of Highland, with my housemates, watching The Simpsons.

The summer is over, and I'm glad to both have had it and to let it go; it's been amazing, but also busy and exhausting in the strangest ways. There was a lot of family time, and a lot of writing and reading time, and a lot of thinking time--all good. But I think it might also be a relief to get back into a routine and turn most of that mental energy to answering e-mails and thinking about course calendars and talking about poems. Time to turn the focus outward.

Minnesota feels so close right now. I think it is because the B is here, and as I'm packing my bag for the morning I keep remembering, suddenly, that I am not alone here. I think it is because the Liz has been to visit recently, and when she was here we got to sit out back and eat cookies and drink coffee and marvel at Mexican chocolate gelato made with chipotle peppers and raspberries and just talk. I think it is because tomorrow I will return to a familiar building, know where to get my office supplies, not have to fight Blackboard or panic minutes before the first class of the day because I realize that I don't know how to properly read the school calendar. I will head back and have people there to greet, doors to knock on and peer my head around, books to sell back and an office that feels right. I think it is because my father, when he comes to visit like he did for a few days last week, arrives via car and not plane. I think it's because last night Jake walked through our door and we drank cans of beer and played records all night, and then this morning I went to bid him an emotional farewell and then realized that I would see him in a matter of days, that he lives an hour south of us now. It's wonderful to have these people here and so close again, but it also makes me think that it's the fall of 2006, and that we'll all run down to Pub for chips and dip and Rag Tops.

I thought in writing this that I'd find my point, some pithy way of getting a handle on missing old lives and simultaneously loving what this life is--because I do, and I do. But I'm four paragraphs in and nothing's floating to the surface. And I have been talking around this point for weeks.

So how about this: tomorrow morning I'll wake up early and drink my coffee and stand in front of a class for the first time in nearly three months. And it will be good to be back, and it will be indescribably lovely to have someone to ride home with.

Or, to look at another way--in the words of Jean, who wrote an e-mail today containing a line that made me giggle for twenty minutes:

Somebody needs to take August out back and put a fucking bullet in it.

Pithy. I like it.

on augusts

Gray and rainy today--godsend weather if you are on crutches, and can only bathe sporadically, and if you have spent most of your days recently sitting on various pieces of furniture, peering at a window or a computer screen or the pages of a book.

Also a good backdrop to spending a lot of time in your own head. Early August can be such a loaded time of the year. Eight of my nine major address changes have taken place in early August. The back-to-school ads are starting to crop up. I have been thinking, if fleetingly, of syllabi and schedules and new legal pads.

Sometimes I miss being a student--someone whose full-time job is to find a seat, pay attention, and take notes. Of course, being a teacher is the second-best thing. Of course, you should wake up every day and find a seat and pay attention. It's just that as a teacher, you have a very different relationship with a campus. It is still a place to learn, but it is also your site of employment.

I miss being a student because I had such good experiences as one. Both Fredonia and Kato, though very different schools, were good places to learn. They were cozy and safe and the campuses were full of secret places to camp out with a notebook and work the brain for a while. Though I don't miss the food. I really should have gotten into the habit of packing lunches much earlier than I did.

Michael Perry mentions in Truck that nostalgia used to be diagnosed as a mental illness. At the very least, it has to be a luxury of the fortunate. I try to remember this. And of course there is something cozy and safe about this apartment, the two of us typing away in different rooms, the dog flipping his favorite toy--a rock--under the furniture.

*

Five years ago today I was starting my second run as a student--this time a graduate one. I woke up in a bed that I had built myself, one of dubious construction and held together with a lot of wood glue. I wore flip-flops, and I did my hair because I thought we might get our ID pictures taken, and I wandered over to the first day of our TA workshop. Later that night, an acquaintance from undergrad took me out to a local bar, and I met some people from the program. One was wearing a blue polo shirt, and he had a shaved head and very nice eyes. He bought my second round for me without asking--just placed a brown bottle in front of me. Oh, I remember thinking. I see. And then Thank god. I was broke and thirsty and tired, and another beer was exactly what I needed.

Later, after most folks called it a night, the three of us wound up at another place, shooting pool. I was very bad. I drew a chalk mustache on my upper lip as penance for biffing yet another shot, and he screwed up his face and pretended to kiss me from a few feet away, and our companion took a photo right then. And I am glad she did.

Then there were more nights out and better games of pool, and he showed up one day in the office with a black eye, the result of an elbow in a pick-up game of basketball, and I sort of swooned. We started calling each other. Usually he would narrate episodes of Pimp My Ride over the phone. We painted a friend's farmhouse and went for pitchers of cheap beer and omelets and we sat in his car listening to music until six in the morning on the day he had to take a rather important teaching certification test at eight a.m. He had the best stories: brothers and farms up north, and Lake Superior and Duluth, and he said bage when he meant bag.

That was my first August in Minnesota, and the weather was sunny and the sky was blue and the horizon flat. Every morning I woke up and wondered what was going to happen that day. I was learning how to be a teacher. I was learning how to take apart poems and put together a syllabus. It was, I would later find out, great weather for the Midwest in August. Everything was catching me off-guard, but in the best possible way.

*

Now it August again. Things are comfortable. It is not my job to find a seat and take notes; instead, I will be the one at the board, writing them. And I can indulge myself in these nostalgic little moments, because in the next room that guy--who has since chosen a mohawk and a pair of chef's pepper pants--is writing while our dog flips a rock at his bare feet. He brews coffee for me, even though he hates the scent of it. For the last week, he has been at my side whenever I've needed him, and he has taught me how to navigate stairs with crutches.

On Monday night, while I was still getting used to the weight of the cast, he took me out for ice cream and we sat in the car, listening to the radio. When the light catches his face just right, you can see the scar under his left eye. And this morning, he placed a plate of hash browns in front of me without even asking.

They were, of course, exactly what I needed.

currently thinking about, in alphabetical order

Appalachian poems. Auburn. Bad memoirs. Big dogs. Blisters. Blueberries. Bourbon. Broken ceilings. Chocolate pudding. Dead things. Denis Johnson. Dogs. Eyebrows. Family. Fast ferries. First books. Green recycled glass. Holland, Michigan. HTML. Incandescent bulbs. Junked fridges. Last summer. Lennie Briscoe. Long grass. Mealybugs. Minnesota--always Minnesota. Morbid curiosity. Moving to Seattle. New York City. Old Polaroids. Orange velvet. Oranges in beer. Paper. Paprika. Parliaments. Poems. Postcards to poets. Potlucks. Red pens. Rosé. Running routes. Sand on calves. Saugatuck. Schadenfreude. The school year. Serrano peppers. Starfish. Stephen Dunn. Students, bosses, students. Sweaters. Swimsuits. Thunderstorms. Two summers ago. Waterfalls. Wedding(s). What comes next. White ceramic. Williamsville, New York. Wisconsin. Wisdom teeth. Writing short fiction. The year 2004.

minneapolis and other recent happys

Today is the sort of day worth mentioning because it's a fine day. Just ... nice. I woke up early and felt rested, I went running, I made some eggs, I conferenced with a handful of students and had a few lightbulb moments, I caught up on a backlog of work and made a bunch of handouts. There were some nice surprises in there, too; desk copies of some fine-looking poetry books arrived, kind editors picked up new work, the web site is nearly complete. It was a gray rainy day, perfect for holing up in the office with Bon Iver; there were quesadillas to be had for dinner; now, there's free time to sprawl out with a Truman tucked up against my legs and listen to new music.

After classes tomorrow, our spring break officially begins. We're already on the other side of midterms, and in a month and a half, we'll be finished with the semester--even before, perhaps, the crocuses raise their heads. I might just break out a skirt by the last day of classes. Spring break won't find me wearing one, unless I want to run around Wisconsin with frostbitten ankles, but I've lived in the north for eighteen years now, so the idea that some very sarcastic air quotes belong around the spring part of spring break is nothing new.

These pleasant little days don't usually find me in the thick middle of winter, but something's different this time around. I'm sure that some of it has to do with the running, and I'm sure that some of it has to do with recent Chicago goodness. I'm sure, too, that much of it is thanks to the past weekend's trip to Minnesota. Originally I hadn't planned on making it out to BockFest, but in late January I changed my mind, so last Friday found the AV and I at Humphrey Terminal by ten o'clock. And then we were off with the Liz, first to the co-op to admire root vegetables and then driving down to Elgin on a cold, clear, sunny day.



I thought a lot about Minnesota this weekend, as we drove from the Cities to Elgin and over to Kato. I thought about the weekend trips I made to the Cities last year from our apartment in Madison, and how those trips were one of the few bright spots in that long winter. I marveled at how foreign the landscape felt. When I first moved to Minnesota, I had panic attacks; the farmland stretched on for miles, and the sky seemed so tall. You could see storms and green skies rolling in from miles away in the summer, and in the winters, the sky was a blue I'd never before seen. It took me months to get used to that horizon.

By the time I left Wisconsin this past August, I was acclimated to that Midwest sky, but a few months in Michigan have wiped that clean from me. This weekend, the sky nearly took my breath away. We'd be rumbling down Highway 14 and I'd be looking out the window, marveling at the flat, bright farms. And I thought about how much has changed in those five years since I first packed the car and headed out to Kato.



But the people I met out there haven't changed, and the weekend with them was just what I needed. This February has been filled with travel, and it's wonderful; although my destinations haven't been balmy, they've been restorative. The whole weekend was nanerpusses and bock and pinot noir and dancing and talking teaching and Neil Diamond, and it fully recharged my battery. It was just what I needed, even if perhaps it was not the most scenic month in which to visit Minnesota.



Like I said, I can't remember a winter that felt this good--of course, I'm still throwing things at the television when they forecast yet another storm, and the skies here are still gray, and it would be nice to be sitting out on the back deck with this laptop and a sweating beer. But something still feels different this winter--a good different.

A former student of mine from Minnesota is applying to graduate schools right now, and because of that I'm reliving a little bit what it felt like to be finishing up in undergrad, to (in my case) not make the first round of acceptances, to realize on a warm April night two weeks before graduation that I was going to need a plan B. That was a strange time, the first in my life I felt the world outside of academia pressing upon me.

No matter what the next year brought--and it brought some other strange times, like a full-time gig waiting tables, and the experience of how to teach a small puppy how to not chew all the crotches out of my clean underwear, and how to break up with somebody that I still lived with, and then, finally, letters from Utah and Florida and Minnesota that said, Yes, you can come here--I do remember thinking that I wanted only to go see where this writing thing would take me. I knew even then that I was in for a little bit of an uphill climb, that I would never make more of an annual salary than most decent bartenders. And definitely not more than the good-looking ones.

But if I had given up after that first round, I wouldn't have moved to Minnesota and met the B. I wouldn't have met people who kick as much ass at Trivial Pursuit as I do. I wouldn't have spent this past weekend rolling over the icy roads back to Kato in the backseat of an Intrepid and eating refried beans and wrapping myself in painter's tape, or photographing orchids in the warm humid of the conservatory, or nearly choking with laughter at Ecopolitan. There wouldn't have been Schell's while standing around in the snow, and I wouldn't have had a stack of papers to grade on the short flights back here, and I certainly wouldn't have had the luxury of this beautiful little Wednesday, holed up in my office with lessons, feeling as if what I I'm doing is something worth a damn.

And that's what I want to tell him--that no matter what comes from this year of his, or what his folks may say to their son, the poet--that spending days busy with what he loves, what he really fucking loves, is one of the most incredible feelings there is. It will make it all worthwhile. It will carry him over the bumps in the road. And I hope for him what I hope for everyone out there tonight: that one day you have a winter day as nice as this one.

the adventures of nanerpus and little cowboy

If you don't like this slideshow, we're not friends anymore.

the end of an era

Pour one out tonight for the place that closed last night--the place where you sang "The Whiskey Song," wore a boot brace, stole a vest five sizes too small and played "Fat Man in a Little Coat," threw up, stole glassware, shot pool, tended an unattended bar and scammed free drinks, brought your own Milanos, broke the lock to, and climbed into, the cubby under the stairs that held the vacuum, turned off all the lights after closing time and sat on the floor behind the bar with the bartender and continued to drink long past two, first met your boyfriend and a West Virginian wearing gray cammo pants, had your first drink in Kato (a Sam Adams bottle, because you didn't know any of the Midwest beers on tap yet), scribbled in Chad's birthday cookbook, ran around the kitchen like you had any business being there, got thrown out of by one set of owners and welcomed back by another, peed in the men's room, smoked in the women's room, ate patty melts and salads with French dressing before a long Thursday night, teared up to "Carolina," watched Seth barely avoid an ass-kicking when he sang a Todd Snider (or was it John Prine?) song for the townies, missed so when you left town that some nights you could not breathe, once stole a bottle of wine from a girl who ordered it, took one sip, and had to leave before she passed out (that one you drank while you watched her friends pour her into a cab), fought over punk music, creative nonfiction, and grammar, drew filthy pictures on coasters, stole drinks, snuck drinks, finished other people's drinks when they weren't looking, paid for drinks, drank something called "The Tarantula" and immediately sprinted for the alley, spent a summer night with the B and Jeano drinking $120 worth of White Russians, held your after-thesis party, stole Limerick Champion t-shirts, won fair and square Limerick Champion t-shirts, tried Scotch eggs and Reuben balls, wandered into the storeroom before it got busy on a Thursday and realized that the owner had only twenty bottles of 99 Bananas in stock and no whiskey, drove to the second you got back into town from Kentucky and one failed job interview, drove to the second you got back into town from Wisconsin and a successful job interview, gathered on Monday nights, Tuesday nights, Wednesday nights, and Thursday nights, avoided on hockey nights, triumphantly returned to last summer in pink sunglasses, griped, laughed, cried, and drank. Oh, how you drank.

what I miss the most tonight

... game nights at Highland.

evening

Tonight I was in the office to see the sky turning the blue that it does on overcast winter evenings. Being in an office past dark always reminds me of the late nights in the halls at MSU. Some nights the offices were full of us, on break from another long night class, or frantically working to finish up an overdue chapter of the thesis, or stealing reams of paper and boxes of cheap pens now that the department secretary was gone for the day. Or hanging out, not quite ready to go home, and maybe hoping for the mention of pints and an invite out.

Sometimes, especially in my third year--some nights it was just me, the only sound in the long hall the cleaning crew moving chairs back into tidy rows. On those nights, as I stood over the printer collecting forbidden print jobs, I could almost see our house from the window. And when I'd get there, face frozen, people would be waiting for me. It was the thing I missed the most last winter, especially on nights when the B was working late on his own campus: the coming home to something full and bright and warm.

And that's what I thought about tonight, driving and maybe listening to the same song over and over again--just me in the car, headed back to a dog, some leftover curry. And yet it was my favorite half-hour of the day: the buses filled with people, and on the radio the smooth voices of NPR telling me everything that happened in the hours I was thinking about myself. And then the spot right at the city limits where the trees fall away to show the buildings downtown, lighted and yellow, welcoming me back.