Cooler than You: Stupid Things I Say and Do

Life back on the east coast has fallen back into its rhythms, as we say.  The weather has cooled, the leaves are changing, I have my annual end of September cold.  Predictability and rhythms are important sometimes.  Right, now as a I sit here amid long essays I'm filing and composing predictability seems to resonate like a founders ale at a locale beer show.  Dark, deep tones of amber, smooth edges of nutmeg and cinnamon making that ale a pumpkin seasonal spout.   Of course, pumpkin anything--in the changing, colorful days of fall--has been a pop culture affection/affection/addition of basic white people .  Even as I sit here now, with a regional pumpkin cider ( Harpoon , to be exact) in a flannel left over from last year's make, I feel a mix of melancholy and romance with the changing seasonal tides. For as much as I love fall, it's colors, and its crisp air it also singles the end of the summer, long days, and sun kissed skin.  Though, this...

I really have little, if anything, in me to say about the NYC bombings this weekend.  Yet, parts of me feel the urge to pontificate . . . of course, there's also the questions from a couple of close friends wanting to know when I'll ponder. When 9-11 happened I was teaching a course--we were covering the Comstock Laws--and when Saddam Hussein was captured I was shoveling my car out of a blizzard.  When he was executed I was in rural Virginia for a holiday and packing, as I was headed to my first trip to Turkey that January.  When Osama Bin Laden was captured I was doing laundry in an urban, city 'hood fashion.   I pontificated here, probably one of the better ones . . . or not.   When bombs, of pressure cookers and burner phones, went off in NYC I was home . . . reading literature on Chinese American restaurants, blaring some "empowered women's mix" from Apple radio, and rotating with edits on a grant application to finally finish my Aegean Sea cultural st...

I'm back in NYC these days, and while the weather slowly changes (or refuses to) I tread on . . . remembering the long, seemingly lazy days of last summer.  Days I want to make come alive again, in spirit and reality.   Newport.  Newport, Oregon for your pleasure.  When traveling I often rent a bike, as its cheap transportation and typically fun.   In this case, spending a month in Corvallis, Oregon I certainly needed a mode to shuttle me about town. Granted, my own two feet would have sufficed, but the little Lime-colored Townie I rented (for a flat rate of 55 bucks a week, lock included) has certainly paid for itself in spades.   I’m told it had—at max—thirty miles on her when I picked her up.   I am certain I have logged more than thirty on old Limey (for the record, when I turned her in the 24th of August, I cried a little tear of goodbye knowing her and I had seen more than a hundred miles of road together).   Aside from getting lost aro...

As I'm back east, in the NYC home, and I decompress and process life on the left coast while running head first into a new semester here's a little meander from the land of corn.  Iowa, a week long stop before heading to the west coast for a month. Not every trip is a great festival of excursions and all night fun.  Yet, even on the most remote trip the balance of life and art are what really make the locale.  As life goes, research and work took me to Iowa.  Yes, Iowa.  Upon leaving I got many a side eye wondering why I was off to a seemingly banal place in the American Heartland.  As one friend rather loudly noted, “You go everywhere! But why  Iowa?! ” Jesting aside, as I sometimes pondered my choice in archives, I packed my bag, headed to the airport, and set out to conquer a state unknown to me.   Perhaps this is where I should provide you with a trite saying like “if you lower your expectations that the joy will increase.” Eh,...