Not All Who Wander Are Lost

Tonight the moon looks like an ear
Silver and pocked behind strands of cloud.

It's been warm, but it was cold before.
The chrysalis that never hatched
Turned black, transparent, glittery, dull,

A shriveled fruit among the strawberry plants,
The unmistakable orange marks of a monarch
Just visible through its dark walls.

It's snowing tonight where my sister lives.
But it's warm here, and damp in the air.

We'll hide the chrysalis from the children
passively, leave it there, dead
among the browning leaves and dark.

Quiet. The moon is listening.

As part of his ongoing obsession with all things Marlboro, old college chum Shaw is interviewing me via email. I'll be posting my responses here as I can get to them. Got no time for othermusing anyway.

We were living together off and on for a couple of years by then, most recently in a shared Somerville, MA apartment under the world largest willow tree. My fellowship at the Museum of Science was coming to an end, and the time felt right to go back to college.

But I also knew that most educational models didn't work for me. You've seen me in the classroom, Shaw -- I'm a bright guy, but I really need to be engaged with the material in order to get much out of it. And I got lost in those long, inevitable hours of background and knowledge that spun out time eternally between every subjectively resonant image, every mind-altering epiphany, in a classroom. It wasn't just a need for small class size, I also needed an environment where everything I was asked to do was, ultimately, something I asked myself to do.

Thank God Marlboro was that place.

I mean, sure, I was in a different place, too. When Darcie and I had dropped out of Bard together halfway through our Sophomore year, it was partially because the only thing we were really getting out the place was each other. Since then, my time as a public programs and school programs fellow at the Museum of Science had taught me that I had some mad skills, but more than that, it gave me a real curiosity about the relationship between the content of our presentations and the mass media models which lurked behind us, audience and presenter alike, and the way this shared awareness of narrative modes framed the ways we developed our demonstrations.

'course, I couldn't have said it like that at the time. That's what Marlboro was for.

Why did I choose Marlboro? Because it was ten miles up the hill from Darcie's parent's house. And Darcie had decided to move back home. And I needed one myself. And Marlboro was perfect.

No time to chat today; I'm busy creating a presentation on the state of technology at my middleschool workplace for tomorrow's PTO Tech Committee meeting.

I'll pop back in sometime soon, and you can hear all about how I backed into my mother's car pulling out of the garage. I promise.

Here's a little draftsonnet fluff from an hour's respite, typed directly into Blogger while the kids watch A Muppet Christmas Carol.

November

Some mornings the fog rests over
the city like snow in a hollow.

A barely sealevel something
must trap the air, the humidity,
something about heat convection

and I wonder whether it evaporates or rises
or if the city just sucks it up somehow
in the collective gasp of awakening.

The rest of the world is tilted green.
There's just that downhill strip of road
Cutting through the farmland

And Springfield in the distance
Poking through her fogblanket
Like Spring rising from the earth.

Posted a few tunes of thanksgiving over at music sharing community Audiography yesterday. Head over for Deb Talan, Chris Smither, and the song least likely to ever again be sung in public lest a horde of angry liberals lynch the singer for promoting molestation. Stay for the rest of the music. This week's theme: late night tuneage.

Coming soon: a workblog entry about Wikipedia pro and con, featuring the classroom potential of Wikipedia Simple English. An entry so obvious in its outline and high points it practically writes itself -- so why haven't I started it yet?

More fully elseblog, the Xmas music continues to pour in, and daddyblogger Phil begins a discussion about the toys kids keeps coming back to.

Kill! Kill! Buy! Buy!

At the mall on Wednesday, past red-suited Salvation Army bellringers, the stores were full of tinsel and snowmen, shimmer and tree, and not much more in the way of crowds than an average Summer sunday. We didn't buy much -- some shoes, a pink peasant skirt for the elderchild, a sit-down lunch at Friendly's -- but we weren't holiday shopping, either.

On our way back home, the year's first Christmas song turned up on the car radio. This morning the astutely audiocool jefito posted his 2006 Holiday mixtape. It's beginning to look a lot like Christmas, and it comes earlier every year.

But shopping on Black Friday? A great way to lose your sanity and your kids. We're not celebrating Buy Nothing Day per se, we just hate the crowds. Happily, a teacher and his family can always start shopping at 3:00 midweek to beat the rush. What do you want for the holidays this year?

One week seeding the house with the colors of autumn, filling the glasstopped table with dried leaves and twiglets, hanging boughs from the post and beam. An afternoon constructing the world's largest cornucopia in the bay window. Two days cleaning, with special attention to the shelfdust and windowsmears for once.

Four leaves on the cherrywood table, and we still need to add the camping table to seat the prospective 18 arriving tomorrow, side dishes in hand.

It's our second year hosting Thanksgiving at home, and it's already looking like another successful family afternoon.

I can't really take credit for much of it.

This year's theme is a celebration of the local. We've bought local milk and cider. Today we picked up the bird: farmbought by Darcie's parents, driven halfway here, and handed off from trunk to trunk in the parking lot of the Ingleside Mall. Tomorrow we make stuffing with the challah she made last Friday.

The family -- my parents and hers, sisters and cousins and aunts -- will converge with their own local goodies, making it a true New England feast, unless my sister manages to bring something on the plane from Ohio.

On the way home from the mall, the suddenly unsullen elderchild insists on singing every verse of Twinkle Twinkle to her sister in the backseat darkness; the everpolite wee one brings Mommy, please help me as her first proper sentence. Our children grow in leaps and bounds, become themselves in firework moments. Tomorrow, they'll be the center of the universe, get drunk on attention.

I am thankful, among many, many things, to have a family like this, a home like this, a place like this. Having come from homeless and uncertainty to this bigenough house full of love makes it easy to give thanks, and then some.

But if I have so much to be thankful for, it is no coincidence my wife runs through this evening's entry like an angel. She is a wonder, and at her best when creating the perfect event environment. She is a mother with everything she's got, and she makes it look easy. She is a partner, a friend, a lifemanager. She who plans the party, schedules the turkey, sets the table, cleans the bulk of the house while I am at work, holds us in, holds us together. Giving thanks, like life itself, would be empty without her.

Happy blogday to me, though the language doesn't spill from me like it used to.

Happy blogday, though the world is quieter now, more full of white noise, less bloggable.

Happy blogday, though we've come a hundred miles or more, lost a generation and a job, had a second child, been homeless and come home again.

Some things haven't changed, I suppose. The beard grew back, though the hair doesn't hang like it once did. My back still hurts; the cigarettes still run my life despite a three month hiatus. My wife still loves me, and I love her.

But the evidence is in the archives. That tiny fistwaver has passed through tyrant into something bright and too-often self-aware. The students I once knew as friends are now just kids, no matter how smart, how coiled, how epiphanic.

The memory of weekly radio broadcast fades into mundania. Memes disappear; the last unhashed past congeals and grows cold on the kitchen counter like the picked-over bones of leftover chicken.

The mind I threw freely into the void smothers under the weight of family secrets, workplace preservation, all the myriad symptoms of a life lived in public as the rest of the world has come online.

I lived at work once; now I clear my head twenty minutes at a time, back and forth ten times a week between two disparate selves.

My voice, my world, my family, my home: some days is seems like nothing is the same.

Four years ago tonight, in the wee hours where I no longer dwell, I started a blog. You were there, too.

It seems like a lifetime. In many ways, I suppose, it has been.

It is still impossible to say just what I mean.

But maybe it's enough to have tried.

Finally got around to signing up for an account over at last.fm, a web-based service-slash-tool that -- among many other social sharing functions -- logs your last-played songs and makes the resulting up-to-date playlist available, like so:

A neat way to give your adoring public some ear-access. Assuming I can find a skin that's narrow enough, look for a permanently placed playlist in the sidebar sometime soon.

What are you listening to?

Not much blogging this week, but spending the week porting 41 gigs of mp3 files over to "Max", our new 200G external hard drive, was well worth the time otherwasted. The newfound space cranks up the downloading habit a bit, especially after a year valiantly struggling to keep room for pix and docs on the 60 gig laptop; at this rate, the 60 gig iPod will be full by New Years.

Mad props from the district superintendent last week for my workblog post on workhabits and instructional strategies to minimize the possibility of losing digital work. Of course, the kudos raise the stakes so high for the next entry, I end up with blogger's block.

Back in the classroom I've got my seventh graders comparing internet news sites with their TV, radio, and deadtree counterparts. Today's assignment: write a letter to a pre-literate infant, recommending one of the big four over the others as a lifelong primary source. Interestingly, no single medium came out a clear favorite; even more interestingly, at thirteen, most members of the post-digital generation can already intuit the basic benefits of each, from portability to personalization of content and context.

In other techhead news, and to come fullcircle back from blogging to musictech, seeing a ska cover of the Batman theme song from my brother's old band pop up on Fongsongs (one of my regular short-to-medium-list of mp3blogs) was kind of like bumping into your local coffee barista in the Dhaka airport lounge. On the other hand, it makes an entire Batman vs. Taxman post so much more than just a front to recapture that old Lenlow mashup.

A few years ago I seriously considered joining the fray for NaNoWriMo -- aka National Novel Writing Month for those of us who, unlike the New Zealand Testing Board that just decided that high school students will be allowed to use "text-speak" in exams, actually still prefer english over cyberspeech.

Happily, by midday on November 2nd of that year, I soon realized I was a plotless idiot who had no business trying to produce junk, whether it be for meme or for later novelfodder. I mean, imagine what most NaNoWriMo participants are cranking out on November 27th at 3 a.m. and you grok the basic problem here. Heck, imagine the dreck that most folks tend to start with, given the lack of general outlining and planning participants speak almost proudly of.

Look, maybe you're Kerouac -- maybe you, too, can produce a short stream of consciousness thingie of quality and innate truth in just a few short weeks on the road of your daily grind. But most of us don't live the whirlwind existence. Most of us have no great unwritten novel fully outlined in our heads. And most of us have much better things to do with three hours of every day than to write as fast as we can about absolutely anything, so long as the keys keep clicking along.

And anyway, my life is my novel. Why force it? Four years and over a third of a million blogwords later (that's six novels, if you're counting), I remain convinced that'd rather pour my energy into family, friends, blog and brain on a daily basis.

To be fair, way back in that fateful November, I bookmarked Novel In Less Than One Year, just in case I ever want to go back. But when I publish my blog excerpts, I'll have the last laugh for sure. When I do write my novel, it will be marked by a lifetime of history and careful craft, not an arbitrary ruler or a clock on the wall.

God bless anyone who manages to actually complete a novel worth reading in the midst of this experiment in mass production -- and there are sure to be just enough exceptions to prove the rule. And God bless you, too, if you have no better way to do what you've always wanted to do.

But, truly, doing it because it's that time of year? Because everyone's doing it? Novels aren't a destination. It's not about speed OR endurance. It's a piss poor way to fulfil your destiny.

Kerouac's powerful, high-school-accessible On The Road is a great story, and it's great poetry, but a novel it ain't -- and Kerouac knew it. Anyone who thinks they can write a novel against deadline would best remember Truman Capote, who said of On The Road: That's not writing, that's typing.

Two indian summerdays in Brooklyn, where art is everywhere, especially in the tinroof apartment my brother and his wife share with their studio spaces. Kid-friendly, pescetarian fun in Central Park and subways, but cities make us nervous, New York City moreso.

We were on the road when I realized I was dizzy. The world looked yellow. My hands felt cold. I pulled over in the rain so Darcie could drive.

Home, the front room is infested with fragile bugs. Their cornhusk wings show on the sliding door like fingerprints. I spend an hour lurking by the chairlegs, waiting for wings visible against the glass, the room spinning.

The garage is an airlock. It's still raining outside the cold house. All night the New York sky glows like a ballfield.

We're closing fast on the end of our fourth year here at Not All Who Wander Are Lost, and other than a little sitetweaking the biggest issue here seems to be the sporadic posting. I've blogged before on this, suggesting at the time that maybe this was a good sign, that the life unbloggable was a life less in need of being blogged.

But the coverage area of possible reasons is endless, remains murky. Perhaps, I wonder, the subconscious is trying to keep a tight reign on the flow of language, lest something slip out. Am I so afraid to see what I am thinking?

On the homestead we spend the morning behind the house, staking and roping where the sliding glass falls off into nothingness. The project will involve a complex deck opening into, varously, a full-scale patio, a suite of halfwooded playspaces and terraces, and a shape-enchoing staircase similarly opening into same from the french doors at the house's other end.

After months of treecutting, becoming comfortable with the space and its possibilities, what was once wooded and closed starts to seem infinite. Funny how, once you've steeped in it a while, the world steps out organically into the senses like that, to become somehow both defined and present.

I like a warm house. That we've not yet figured out how to dampen the wood furnace properly pleases me.

The laptop -- our sole computer -- holds 60 gigs. So does the iPod. What with photos, software, and room for the occasional word document, that leaves the 'Pod glass perennially 2/3 full. Or is it 1/3 empty?

Two short-attention-span kids + an endless number of short clips from classic Sesame Street episodes on YouTube = three nights running of postprandial snuggletime.

If the natural trend of the universe is entropic, why do we clean the house again?

You know how, on late eighties sitcoms, they've got that hilariously wry handyman who never seems to finish that endless series of odd jobs? We're looking for one of those. I think his name is Mike.

"Mr F., you know what movie you need to see?" "No, Courtney, but it wouldn't matter unless it's rated G." We haven't had a proper date since the elderchild was born. Maybe that's not such a bad thing.

Used to be, the very mention of a bath would set the dog barking madly. Now it sets of the dog and both kids. Bubbles, Dada? Indeed.

Blogger's cut their users off from their FTP accounts as of the 31st. Note to self: after three years, it's probably a bit late to update the old about boyhowdy pages anyway. Want to know more? Read it anyway, and extrapolate from there.

Reason #4,572 why my wife rocks: the local consumer bureau is paying us thirty bucks to use two packs of diapers we'd have bought anyway, and all we have to do is answer a few easy questions online and call for our check. I'd give details, but we're not supposed to tell anyone. Shhhh...

Reason #4,573: The wee one's caterpillar costume won a prize at the town hall after the Halloween parade.

In a universal nod to fairness, the elderchild's butterfly fairy photo showed up full color in the local paper two days later. I'd post the pic, but they're a bit too local for that.

In other news, there's nothing like an almostfull moon in a clear sky the first night it freezes over. Stay here awhile, baby: it's cold outside.