getting back to the garden

this was the year to unfuck my life, and i suddenly find myself moving into the third and final phase of that plan. we close on the new place today, and i'll be cleaning and moving until Thanksgiving. i won't have internet until the last week of november, but i'll probably run to a nearby town once or twice to check my gmail and peek in here. (i lost a lot of mail and email addresses with my two computer swaps, so please use my gmail address. i dislike gmail, but i can now really see the benefit.)

i moved to the city almost eight years ago. i've always said living here is a little like being held underwater.

don't get me wrong. i love the twin cities and i always thought i would be able to adjust, but it never happened. I've spent years searching for solitude and quiet in order to write, but solitude and quiet doesn't exist here. This place is all about noise and energy.

I thought the condo would simplify my life, but instead it complicated it in a very water torture, mundane sort of way. By early July i was losing my mind and looking for a cabin in northern MN and WI. cold was no longer an issue -- escape was. i'd been looking for an old church or schoolhouse off and on for seven years, but i'd pretty much given up on that idea when i came upon the church listing.

a weird chain of events led to it -- the sale of my house -- which in this market i now realize was in itself amazing, the unsuitable condo situation, stumbling across the church listing completely by chance, a buyer's market, a seller/architect who had hoped an artist of some sort would live in the world he'd created, an absolutely amazing real estate agent i originally didn't want to work with because i was dead set against working with a guy, a mortgage broker who never gave up. So many people working so hard to make something happen. I also think the trip to Sweden reset my brain and got me off autopilot at just the right time.




As writers, I wonder if we sometimes have a harder time figuring out our own lives because we view the world through so many eyes. We know what our characters want, but we don't always know what we want.

We live so many lives that aren't our own, and maybe we live our lives less fully because of that.


so will this final phase unfuck my life? maybe. maybe not.

on display with nothin' to say

blogging:

The thing that's been really frustrating is that I can't talk about what I want to talk about. Shortly after starting this blog, I found my locked lips so frustrating that I started another semi-anonymous blog where I vented and talked about my personal experiences in publishing. A fellow writer ended up reporting me and the blog...to somebody. After that experience, I pulled the plug on my "secret" blog, but wow -- I would have had some interesting and unbelievable stuff to post there.

Almost every day I think of something I want to blog about, and almost every day I think I'd better not say that. Even topics that on the surface seem fairly harmless. So anyway, rather than go on and on about me and my boring life, I'm going to close my blog at the end of this year. It might not be a permanent close. I'm going to wait and see if I feel like opening it again in the spring or summer.

defining a generation

for some it's the Beatles.
for some it's Dylan.
for me it's always been Neil Young.

I love so many bands and so many different kinds of music, but if I had to choose one band or one musician, it would be Neil Young. I've had obsessions with bands that will last a few years, then I tend to put the music away and remember it as a certain period of my life. The Pixies period. The Joy Division period. The Velvet Underground period. The Belle and Sebastian period. But Neil Young was never an artist I put away to bring out occasionally. Been listening to him ever since Buffalo Springfield.

Last night as we filed into Northrup Auditorium, I kept looking at the ticket in my hand. Never thought I'd hold one with his name on it.

He was amazing. His voice sounds like it did forty years ago. He started out with an acoustic set. He was the only one on stage, and would move from instrument to instrument. Then came the electric set and he pretty much blew the place away.



11-08-2007, Northrop Auditorium, Minneapolis, Minnesota
w/ Rick Rosas, Ben Keith, Ralph Molina, Anthony Crawford & Pegi Young

1. From Hank To Hendrix
2. Ambulance Blues
3. Sad Movies
4. A Man Needs A Maid
5. No One Seems To Know
6. Harvest
7. After The Gold Rush
8. Mellow My Mind
9. Love Art Blues
10. Love Is A Rose
11. Heart Of Gold
---
12. The Loner
13. Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere
14. Dirty Old Man
15. Spirit Road
16. Bad Fog Of Loneliness
17. Winterlong
18. Oh, Lonesome Me
19. The Believer
20. No Hidden Path
---
21. Cinnamon Girl
22. Like A Hurricane

Restless Dawn

Jason is holding another short fiction contest!

The Clarity of Night

RIP MacBook

no, i haven't reposted an old entry. my NEW MacBook started acting sluggish, then quit working after five days. wouldn't recognize the hard drive. i took it to apple and they got it going again. thought maybe things had just come loose during shipping. it started the sluggish thing again a few days ago, then yesterday when i tried to restart, it once again showed no hard drive. this time they gave me a new computer, but acted suspicious and said they'd never seen this problem before. i know the first generation macbooks had a lot of problems, which is why i put off getting one as long as possible. anybody else have a similar macbook experience?

of mice and men

i'm in the process of packing and i will be moving in two weeks. yay!! i can't wait!! there were so many obstacles to buying the church, but one by one they were resolved and everything is in order and set to close.

the mouse situation here is still unbelievable. i've never experienced anything like it, and i've lived in some dumps. even though it's cold, i have windows open and window fans going around the clock, and still the smell of dead mice is overpowering and makes me dizzy. i was told to put out poison, and i go through one small box a day. i've thought of reporting it to the health department, but i hate to do that because i think the condo owner will get in trouble when it is really the fault of the association. they do absolutely nothing about anything. nothing. after six months, my phone number still hasn't been entered in the box at the front door. but every time I run into the guy who's supposed to do it, he says he'll do it in a few days. haha! it's really a shame, because this is such a cool, beautiful building, but a condo is only as good as the association.


i'm a really negative person, and i know i always look for the negative in every situation, but this mouse thing -- it's bad.


oh, and just having a cat in the house will not keep them away. my poor old cat is scared of them. :D he went to his scratching post and a mouse eeked and jumped out at him. the cat scrambled and has been paranoid and nervous ever since.

but all things considered, i'm glad i tried living here because for years i've wondered if it wouldn't be easier to live in a condo or apartment where somebody else takes care of things. foolish me.