Monday 27 September 2010

Til now, I had never known love





This image is of the back of the stage at one end of the main room of The Antiquarium in Brownville, NE. Map cases. Art. Wood.

There are whole areas that smell vaguely of stained glass studio and a room with a typewriter from some time in the Dark Ages that my fingers twitched to touch, to use, to bring to life for them.

I did not buy anything. I took my father there on Sunday. He bought a 2 volume set of Plutarch's Lives. He told me that I had made an impression on my previous visit on the proprietor (a bare-foot and amiable Tom), who described me as self-affected (or -effected, I am not sure which). He continued to say that I knew what I wanted to do and didn't need anyone to help me. Wrapped in my tweed and scarf clutching scrap paper to my chest as a blanket, I believe the description is not unkind, but correct. My parents agree.

There is a kind of similarity about places and people who show love to each other through the medium of books. It is the spaces that I love: the specificity in a reading area; the smell of contemplation; the muffled sounds of trafficked floors and the deliberately random conversations. Everything you can see is alive in a place that loves the life of books and book-people. Every book is a conversation and when you open it at random or on purpose, the conversation invites response. It is the same with the people who care for collections of books.

There is a difference between a life that is spent living and one that is spent collecting. A room with a bunch of books is not the same as a room that is a library. I worked with books that were treated as objects, as commodity, and never could internalize it. Library is the world of books that makes sense to me. There is some kind of order, it doesn't even matter particularly what kind of order as long as order exists. Collections and sections exist, as to interactions between those collections and sections and their curators and their interactors. Intra-Library networks.

I love the smell of bookshelves. I love that I know someone who smells the differences in dust as chocolate or lemon custard. I love that I argue with someone about what exactly defines a library and that there is someone else whose definition matches mine exactly. I love that there is someone in this world whose life is like the one that I want to live.

That all paled the moment I walked fully into The Antiquarium. There is a soaring of spirit that happens with love. A kind of smile that is only partly on the lips, the rest of it living in lungs and spleen and leg muscles.  A challenge and contentment. The possibility of Life.

A beautiful thing about loving the spaces of books is the 's' at the end of the word. Plural. Unconfined. Possible.

I live in a town with a used book store like a used book store. It is jarring. I come from a city with two used book stores like libraries, the most comfortable and accommodating way stations for books and their likers and their lovers. A Novel Idea and Bluestem Books changed my way of thinking about bookshops entirely, and for the better. The Antiquarium showed me a way of my future.

It is good to fall in love again.

Sunday 26 September 2010

Big Crazy Idea (the two-th)

November: National Novel Writing Month, is just over a month away. Tonight and tomorrow and probably the next day as well will involve writing short stories based on photographs taken by one of my favorite photographer/Muses; they begin the reconnection with the stories of a larger/longer work (see below). Tonight and tomorrow, the next day and probably month will involve writing a long short story arc based on a little idea in my brain for my other Muse who will draw my voice in my absence.

I was thinking: wouldn't it be fun to write the 50,000 words for NaNoWriMo and then take the time to edit them together with the other 60,000 words I've already written of the same novel (really, I love this story. it is never going to not be in my brain. I hope.) and craft something like chapters? I do not mean that it will be fun to edit the thing, mind, I mean letters. I mean to send my writing out to people deliberately as shareable object, as art.

Now that I have quite the small stash of plantable and other sorts of gorgeous paper (paper that is not for the insides of journals, mind, but the outsides of insides that are meant to hold the ends of good decisions, or bad decisions well written), I have the means to create little books of small bits of fiction.

But what's the fun of just sending these things out into the world (of a very carefully chosen audience made entirely out of the people that I love (not a very small number, I know, but still))?

What I'm thinking is a reading. Something involving lots of tequila (for me and my ego) and friends and chapter indicators drawn out of a hat (or a mixing bowl)(or a frog) and chapters read aloud.

So.

Beginning November 22 and ending December 10 I will send chapters of my novelthing of fairytales-sort of through the US Postal Service to people whose addresses I have and who actually want to be involved in this. I do not care what state you are in - Skype is our friend. I do not care how long I have known you.

If you opt to get a chapter: 1) please be willing to share with other people, but only other people that you are going to be able to find later (readings don't work when there's nothing to read); 2) please be happy to read whatever chapter you have when it comes time to share.

I would like to wait until Spring to do something like a reading, though, as the plantable paper will need to be planted after the reading, and that is the kind of thing that spring is very good for.

Let me know if you are In. I am not interested in conscripting participants into my activity. I believe in consenting adults only.

Friday 24 September 2010

The Friday Love Blog

These make me happy. They really do. And also:

Singing out loud at the grocery store. It sounds better than normal, but different than in-the-shower better than normal. I wonder if it has to do with the part where, like dancing in the grocery store, it's not that you can't do it, it's that most people just don't. When Wil Wheaton is Boss of the World, I'm going to start a grocery store chorale. To go with the dancing.

Porridge Papers, the papermill and letterpress store of amazing and possibility. Where are also employed some of the most creative and wonderful people I've met yet. And that's saying something, because, really, I've met my friends! Anyway, they have a blog, they've been on TV, they've made plantable paper for someone in ENGLAND (which is not the same place as Nebraska) and have opened a second location in Brownville, NE (where there is a regionally famous flea market this weekend (hint hint)).
Also, they are sending me a sack so that I can buy a 5$ sack of scrap paper, even though that sale ended last Saturday. My heart goes awwww right here. Right at this moment where a business I support in my words and my heart makes it that much easier for me to support them with a few dollars. You need to friend them on Facebook and then spend lots of money on very big orders of sparkly scented seed-filled paper! Scented!

You know it's love when Freakangels makes you smile on a skip week.

I've been away for a while, but Hannelore and Faye win.

So do the Book Reviews at Unshelved. Yes, the comic is good, too. Of course the comic is good. My heart is a librarian. Sheesh.

Me and LibraryThing, we got a thing going on.
It's cool.

And thanks to AirTreks (those stinky travel people), I now have a new blog to read that reminds me to spend my time well, not just because I can. The Traveling Savage. I love this name. Love it.

Normally, Veronika von Volkova shares of photographs and images that speak more than a thousands of words (not always SFW). Today, she also shared teh cutest travel arrangements ever.

Next week, I will have a new thing to share with all you. But it will take a week to set up and all of that, so be patient, darlings.

And yes, more Big Crazy Ideas on the way.

Wednesday 22 September 2010

Big Crazy Project Idea (the one-th)

K Street Power Plant in Lincoln, NE sits at the intersection of 9th and K. My grandfather worked there. My father has memories of visiting him and of the noise and the heat and the boilers that dwarfed houses and also of orange soda that he drank as a treat on those days in that hot place.

The building is filled with boxes of stuff that the city of Lincoln is saving against the time when it will need to know that Mr and Mrs OffTheirRocker decided to home school their children instead of committing blasphemy by allowing someone not God or themselves to do so in 1985. According to the 1998 Annual Report of the Library/Archives Division of the Nebraska State Historical Society, "This space will accommodate the acquisition and storage of state, county, and local government records, as well as security copies of government microfilm."

I have a better idea.

The K Street Power Plant Foundation, a community based privately run library and art space. The library's collection features mostly periodicals, classics, comics, graphic novels and webcomic based publications and collections.

The periodicals collection specifically and deliberately includes every issue of Foreign Affairs, History Today, Biblical Archaeology Review, any title in the classics, literature, urban studies, libraries, geosciences and titles collected from the offal of libraries whose collections are cut in the name of "better customer service." We, of course, encourage all private citizens and university departments to do the same; to house these collections and make them available as they can.

The Librarians have a soft spot for comics and comic artists and so have amassed a collection that appeals mostly to them. They have diverse tastes. Supporting individual artists is part of the function of strong communities, and in this world of the internet and globalization, community is no longer defined solely by physical proximity. Forum proximity does make a difference, and many of the artists whose work is on the walls, or has inspired the Steampunk themed interior design, particularly of the main reading room and its balconies are known to The Librarians personally or through one of a few very specifically chosen online fora.

The Librarians also believe that knowledge of the thought patterns of the past and present lend foundation to the thought patterns of the future. Work of Greek and Roman and Arabic and Byzantine and Mesopotamian and Indian and Chinese and Japanese and so on thinkers have been collected for perusal and nibbling and discussion. Seminal works in different genres have been collected in duplicate or triplicate where possible.

The Librarians do not feel that it is appropriate to expose curious minds to tripe and dreck and would therefore appreciate it if you would keep your suggestions that they include more vampire romance, girl mysteries and crackpot conspiracy histories to yourself. This is a private library. Membership can be revoked based on just how stupid The Librarian thinks you are that day. They are trained to maim. Be aware, and be thoughtful.

This is a privately run library for several reasons. We felt that it would be prudent to allow the city to learn us as we learned them, that would be slowly. That relationship ought to be kept as positive as possible, therefore we felt that it was better for us, situated as we are in a very tense little city, to place limits on who could interact with our collections. We decided that anyone over the age of 16 could become a member without parental consent, thereby reflecting the policy of the public library system. Given the more, eh, naked or violent or heretical or downright ridiculous nature of some of the material in this collection, we realized that we were not suffering by imposing limitations. Sometime avoidance works. We call it deflection.


We also chose to manage this privately because of our need for control. We wanted control over everything that came into this building. We wanted to choose it all individually and with purpose. We wanted to be the only ones dictating where the radiant heating would be, how many solar panels we expected, where the glass forge and the kiln would go downstairs, how much gallery space, how much studio space and how comfortable the upstairs apartments would be. We wanted to make sure that the designs for the leaded glass windows that face 9th Street would be left to their creator to design and to us and our friends to build and install. In short, we wanted to be The Queen.

It is written into our mission statement and our bylaws that this Foundation has as one of its long term goals integration with the Lincoln City Libraries. Twenty years seems a good time to determine what role the Power Plant will play in this community and how well-funded it will manage to make itself.

******
The windows facing 9th street all leaded in a design created by a local artist and crazily talented person (already chosen).

The main reading room with a second floor walkway around the outer perimeter, heated by radiant heat and active solar, cunningly designed to keep the sunlight off of the collections and the artwork. The floor warmed with rugs and computer stations for webcomic viewing and research and creating. The old boilers in pieces holding us all in to a huge open space. The desk attended by two qualified librarians and a volunteer or intern. Always with the power to revoke privileges for the day or for the ever.

Apartments (two) at the top of the building to be used by artists in residence, rent as work - 20 hours a week in the library or in a gallery, doing outreach, organizing something that we just don't feel like doing, planting the rooftop garden, teaching a child to draw, that kind of thing.

Studios for rent at reasonable rates to those who make it past us (the jury) and our peer group of advisors (who also know stuff).

Gallery space and small show space for theater, music, 2D and 3D art.

Collaborate with other galleries and venues during Lincoln-wide music and arts events. Collaborate with the university to provide alternate and creative spaces for conference presentations and events. Invite local organizations to hold fundraisers in the space on a sliding scale. (They provide the catering and the decorating and the tables and chairs, we just do space. Unless we like them and they are active and nice people and not likely to show up and piss us off. (We are sensitive to this.))
******

No idea how much it would cost. Never did get my hands on the blueprints. Don't even have a reasonably good picture of the place to shove in people's faces when I get all tangential and have to prove how brilliant and community minded I really am. Really. I am.

The city entertained bids to turn the building into condos about 8 or 9 years ago. Well, Mayor Seng acted like she was entertaining those bids. She denied them just before it was point of no return. The money would have to be physical and present and the proposal damn tight.

Patience and practice and faith.

It is still The K Street Power Plant. We power the creative.

Tuesday 21 September 2010

Allow me to state my reasons ...

My quest for graduate schools is, yet again, proving to be a challenge. Preservation and Conservation of Texts falls into the same category as Archives Management, and every program wants to make me a leader in the field of records management.

I do not want to be a leader. I have never wanted to be a leader. It's work and it involves administrative stuff. No. Really. But thanks for the opportunity.

I missed a phone interview yesterday with a woman who may just have every qualification that I want to have (including the part about working to restore and repair library bits). There is frustration, and there is time.

It is no longer a story of discovering my life's goals and interests. It is story of what skills need to be developed, what experiences gained, what understanding and resources discovered in order to achieve those goals and live a life that is involved and communicative and active and creative.

Libraries exist in several planes: the physical collection of materials - of books and artwork and photographs and maps and directories; the physical catalog of information that is stored and accessible in that physical collection - Librarians and card catalogs; the aether based collection of materials - digitized works of literature, reference works and artworks; and the aether based catalog of information; and the physical and aether presences of the library itself - the places where people go, the destination.

All of these presences and functions relate to the function of Library in community as a resource to meet immediate needs (entertainment, job seeking, completion of assignments, paying bills) and as it meets longer term community needs, needs that relate to the definition of a community, to its legitimacy in the larger world, to the survival of a community in times of need and emergency whether it such an emergency is caused by nature or humanity.

My personal goal is to become a person who is a trained academic librarian, and a trained bookbinder and a trained restorer and repairer of books and other texts. Librarians provide support to communities in chaos, and yet there are few who provide support to them.

Time spent behind the front desks at various government supported institutions, universities and libraries, taught me that people have the most incredibly varied sets of questions. I have witnessed the difference between a question that can be only partially answered by the person behind the desk, and one that can be fully answered. That difference usually lies in the training and abilities of the person behind the desk. Administrative encouragement also plays a large role.

I do not believe that I would have learned to be as brave and persistent in following up on questions were it not for my supervisor at the University of Nebraska - Lincoln who believed that every person who called, even the people who called by mistake, had valid questions and those questions ought to be answered if we could. If we could not, we had the responsibility to get that person as close to an answer as possible. It was a tremendous lesson in public service. It meant that I interacted with people for longer as I learned what they were asking, what I could do to help them. It meant that I began to see conversations as more than small talk. I learned to understand the nature of questions.

At the Bennett Martin Branch of the Lincoln City Library, I witnessed the power of parsing questions into easily (or at least directly) answerable segments. That was the place that taught me about the power of loving your job. I have never worked in an environment that was so administratively negative or micromanagerial in my life. I have never seen such talented and dedicated and competent people so disregarded and marginalized. I had never been witness to the destruction of departments and collections and careers.

And yet, I loved my job. I was happy there. The three years that I worked as a shelver, and the 12 or so months that I was employed as a temporary Library Assistant II changed my life. I respected and enjoyed my co-workers. That was the place that showed me the person I want to be. I realized that I would not be able to be that person, with that set of skills, without further training and that would only be found in graduate school.

A short stint in the Binding Department of UNL's Love Library, a history of making leaded glass windows, jobs making pizza and sandwiches, work dissecting thistle heads and working on thistle crew, reading the Ink Trilogy by Cornelia Funke and the One Book, One Lincoln selection from 2009, The People of the Book by Geraldine Brooks, as well as a life long love and pursuit of ceramics and knitting and crochet and cooking: these are my inspiration and motivation to learn bookbinding and book preservation. A sense of the world as my home, and my place in it as requiring community involvement leads me to seek out an academic foundation in the history of libraries and their destruction and restoration and repair. It also leads me to build a history of volunteerism and to pursue a career in being present where libraries are damaged by human and natural causes. To be an aid to recovery and survival with two competent hands, a good sense of humor, and an even better sense of the place of library in the world and in human history.

Friday 17 September 2010

Oh, baby, it has been awhile...

On Twitter it's called Follow Friday #FF.
I used to do this because it seemed the best use of my time on Friday afternoons when I was bored and not doing work at work. I miss it.

This is a list of things that make me smile or captivated:

Freakangels
I read at Whitechapel that this will end after the 6th volume. We are now about half way through volume 5. Yes, they are and will continue to be available as trades, but there is something lovely and immediate and taunting about waiting for Friday morning and the potential for a Skip Week or a flashback or even more gut-squirmingly gorgeous images and dialogue.

Everyone is reading Unshelved, right?
RIGHT?
Right.

I reconnected with my GoogleReader this week. It was nice, getting rid of all the old, unread and unnecessary old stuff and really focusing on the present, with the knowledge that the temptation of understanding will win out over any qualms I have about hours spent reading archives. Public art holds a place in my heart that was happy to be rediscovered.

Beauty from and thru Wooster Collective...

... Tape Art in Slovenia
... Stinkfish (compelling and entrancing and I don't care if I can never read the language on the page, it is beyond words)

And then, then there is fora.tv.
I've actually bothered to do the whole having-an-account thing. The profile does a thing which made the commitment worthwhile: it tells me what I have watched and what I'd like to watch (I tell it that part (it is not mind-readerly (ew))). Programs are tracked in ways that are not limited to tags, which is refreshing. The Long Now Foundation hosts many lectures, about 61 of them are available for viewing through fora.tv at no cost (there is a paid-for-it account that allows greater access to the videos on the website, but I'm having a blast without it. Truly.). No cost for an hour of lecture? Yes. Yes much.

Lord Martin Rees speaking about the cosmos is easily my favorite. Astrophysicists ask incredible questions and find intriguing ways to answer them.

Wade Davis speaking of the importance of cultural diversity and its maintenance is a program that I will be happy to watch again and again. His delivery belies a life spent around campfires and in tents and close places where people speak many words without interruption and think carefully before doing so. It is worth noting that this talk is preceded by a shortlong film that is breathtaking.

Next on my list of programs to watch is Fun Inc,: Games as the Business of the 21st Century because duh!

The world is a beautiful place.
Enjoy it.

Thursday 16 September 2010

Cloudy with drizzle and courage

I am wearing my bathrobe today. All day. Until I go to work. Or for a walk through the town to be braver about the weather than I am right now. Now I am safe and indoors with a lovely view of things from the distance of my father's desk.

My desk no longer offers such safety - it is covered with a letter half-created and three more to write today. I cannot say that they will be wonderful these letters, but I do not believe that they will suffer for it - rhythms are most often reached through repetition. It is the repetition's crash that I find difficult.

Any writer or artist will tell you this: the act of doing is indescribable. The act of having done is freefall and reaction. It sucks. The only way that I have ever found to keep some of that under control is to limit the amount of time I spend doing the words into some kind of order thing, or to limit the words, or to make certain that what is written is meaningless and disconnected. But these are all false and they do not work.

It is an act of bravery that will get me off my ass here and back on my ass in there, typewriter to hand, words in no pre-determined order put down on paper to be sent to unsuspecting friends and acquaintances. They are all of good humor. I hope.

I am reading The Geography of Strabo (in translation, of course) and am struck by something that is so terribly human and yet so terribly limiting. Strabo spends a good amount of time criticizing the words and works of others. There are various and valid reasons for this: to establish the correctness of the sources he uses; to define what are the limits of geography in terms of geometry, astronomy and physics; to define a vocabulary and expectation of word use; and to be kind of a jackass at people who he thinks are just wrong, and blind and make dangerous assumptions (cough cough).

At one point, he discusses a map that was drawn and became very popular and well read and he complains, rightly, that even though the map does not represent what is known of the known world at the time (even when it was drawn), and that many scholars and scientists recognized the problems with the map, it was not redrawn and the mistakes must be explained over and again because people used it, they believed it. It was written. If, as someone recently said to me, if we acknowledge that every writer is a product of time and place, then how much can I imagine it would take not only to publicize a map, to defend it and distribute it, but what would it take to do more than point and scoff at its mistakes. To make an argument of a conversation, to willingly engage with another person's intellect, ability and experience in order to alter a thing which has been made almost concrete; these are acts of confidence and openness that always astonish me.

It is one thing to blather on a will. I do that all the time. Even in my brain, when I'm not talking to anyone or writing anything, there is blather. Really. It doesn't ever actually stop. But rarely is it well-thought out and even more rarely am I prepared to brook dissent and argument. (Granted, most of the arguments that have been leveled at me are of a personal nature and do not much more than convince me that most people are not as willing to see things from different perspectives as I generally find desirable (really).(in other words, we don't hang out.))

Most of my relationships involve a certain degree of distance. Usually that distance is intellectual or emotional. Now that it is physical and not likely to become less as time goes on, but more, I find that there is a need for courage.

The sky glows light gray in front of the afternoon sun. I've boxes to move yet and letters to ponder. This evening I will take a long way to work.

Tuesday 14 September 2010

A difficulty, considered...

I am going to India.
The money is paid, the tickets are bought.
One of my best friends is getting married Hindu-style to one of the best men I know, and my parents made sure that I can be there.

So, that's awesome, right?

I just got a job - it pays minimum wage, it involves standing and stuffing inserts into papers for 3 hours one night a week and not more than 12 hours another night.
It is work. It is a paycheck. It is a start.

Last night was the first shift I'd worked since I learned I'm going to India this winter, so I took a moment and told my boss that I will be gone from work for probably 3 weeks over Christmas.

Her response was "Well, I guess I'll have to let you go," which I interpreted as she'd have to fire me and hire someone else for the season (a thing which I kind of feel is not entirely unreasonable) and then, "I usually like to only have one person gone at a time, and I think someone else is going to be gone, but since you're going to India, I guess I'll have to let you."

A) I will quit if it comes down to that.
B) "Let" me go? Are you sure about that?

and then this happened in my brain:

Minimum wage work tends to be the most physically demanding, both in terms of the kind of work that is done and the lack of flexibility there is in doing it. The people who do what I think of as necessary grunt work are treated as replaceable and yet are reminded of their responsibility to show up and work hard and to not expect any of kind respect or meaningful acknowledgment. I have worked many of these jobs, and am forever astonished at the callous ways in which my co-workers and myself have been treated, especially as the timeliness and correctness of the work we did was always somehow crucial to the future lives of other people. They needed us and yet we were inferior and dismissed.

I recognize that a degree in higher education and/or specialized training and skill development get rewarded. I intend to go to graduate school and to develop specialized skills so that I can be rewarded. It is not unfamiliar to me, nor is it to me unfair. I do not intend to ever be at a job where I am not working. I do not intend to pursue a career in something that allows me to ignore it for hours a day or days a month or months a year while still insuring me an unbalanced allotment of power. I intend to work with people whose skills are not necessarily the same as mine, but are respected by me and by each other.

So here is the observation: The people who are not paid enough to provide themselves with adequate (much less desirable) medical treatment are the ones who are also not offered benefits as opposed to the people who can afford to pay for private doctors and full-coverage insurance without having to go through an employer. The people who cannot afford to not work for a few days (much less to travel (more on that later)) are not even offered vacation days. This is an imbalance that seems more than unfair, it seems unspoken. There is nothing that makes me less of a human being than someone who makes 4 times what I do in one day. And yet there is this expectation of disregard and distrust and its resultant anger and despair.

My experience of people is that while we speak words that seem to express our general sentiment that we are all created equal, we all do live lives that continue to reinforce the idea that some of us are more equal than others, and that there is somehow a moral component attached to a paycheck. Better people deserve more nice things to themselves. Those of us who have accepted generous gifts offered by people in our lives are not as good as the people who have provided these things for themselves. (Having said that: it is humbling to accept such gifts, and my gratitude knows no bounds. Travel is the thing that I do when I am the most myself, and nothing can express how happy I am whenever I get to pursue it.)

I would be self-sustaining. I would thrive and in some ways profit. I do not doubt that I've gotten my life into a position where it has to become creative and active and all the things that it needs to be in order to be more than it was 5 months ago. That was sort of the point.

None of this makes me a better person. I would not give up the physical act of work just because it seems that the society in which I live ascribes a certain level of negativity to it.

Much of the frustration in my life over the last several years has been an inability to express discontent in any way that does not seem irrational or self-indulgent or illogical. I am in no way free from my own politics, but that does not mean that I am shackled to a position or perspective. I have no idea what I will do with this slightly less shrieky approach to inhumanity in the world, but I like the idea that I can listen more easily.

Sunday 12 September 2010

Closets and hidden hypocrisy

Categorical statements and I have a long and occasionally problematic relationship. They tend to make a liar out of me. I resent them fully and yet have not figured out how to get them out of my life.

I found four pairs of high heels today as I was organizing the closet in my office. It was an immediate thought that I would need to issue some kind of retraction to a statement I made in my last blog entry lest I be called out.

Defensive, much? Bitter, many? I can't think of a non-platonic relationship that I've had where we both were not almost perpetually under an ill-fitting microscope. It is a response that I've earned, this anger and bitter.

But it is dull. And it gets nothing done. And it takes up space in the closet.

Friendships take so much time to build that there is no way to go forward without putting a label to something like an inconsistency and moving on. When you can see nothing but those labels, look elsewhere, and don't be too discouraged if someone else does the same. It is not possible to be everyone's beloved.

It is, however, possible to be beloved of your own closet. Which means that the denim capris that make me look like a model in Women's Edition will have to go. As well as the >shorts< ooo, those are not okay.

Not gonna wear it, don't keep it around, right? Not gonna love it, why worry whether you like it or not? Space is at a premium in this world. No need to take up too much.

Although, I do have this brilliant idea for keeping the broken down boxes from getting ew-y and filled with insecty things and too much gross: I will stand them up on their folded ends, supported between shelves or posts or filled boxes, and I will wrap them in a tarp, to keep whatever it is that might just move into the dry and warm attic from making a home in the things that will hold the guts of my home when it comes time to figure out just what that means. Again.

I interact with the stuff of my life, these nerve-endings in shoes and empty boxes cringe every moment, my fingers shake with the case cutter in them, ready to slice open something else, some other internal organ holding only it knows what. Every box could be marked Pandora and it would be less of a Greek Drama. My days begin in a line of fire over the trees out of my window and end in a pool of blood from my own caustic roaming. I wish every day for the this to be done. For something to settle into itself and become the thing called 'How I live'. And yet, much is in the wrong place, much is in no place yet, there are still unopened boxes that much be faced. The ones called "Storage" are for the next life, the next home. I forget how tiring it is to do this. I forget to wash my hands and rub my feet. I forget to always be gentle. I forget to require clarity.

I kept one pair of the high heels. I wore them in a wedding 5 years ago. If I never wear them again, I don't really care. They are a part of my past that I love.

Friday 10 September 2010

Walking home

It is curious to me that as I've gotten older, people have become more and more concerned with how much I walk and when and more and more apt to offer me rides, even when I can see no reason for it.

As a child, I walked home from school almost every day. I know: uphill both ways in snow with no shoes and 100 pounds of books. While there was a slight rise leaving the school, I fully admit that it was downhill the whole way, I mostly forgot my books and my parents were very vigilant about my footwear. Although I was not always good about wearing long pants or tights. It was about a mile and a half, and since I walked at the pace of a stoned snail stuck in molasses, it took about an hour every day.

And No One Protested. No One. No one said "Call me when you get there." No one gave me that raised eyebrow look of despair at my act of self-transportation. No One.

When I was 17 and lived in Great Barrington and worked at the pizza joint, I walked about 3/4 of a mile to and from work. Going to work was nice, coming home was terrifying. There were no street lights, the road was almost always completely deserted and there was a cemetery that I had to pass. Also, it was winter in the Berkshires, I was miserable and cold and jumpy for the entire 7 months I lived there. It was so dark. I had never known that kind of dark in a residential area in my life. Ever. I learned a lot about being aware of my surroundings there. How to judge the distance from one house to another; how to know where my feet would fall on sidewalk or street no matter how much snow, things that I'd never processed before, but had known from experience.

In Wichita in my early 20's, I walked. And again, while occasionally friends would loan me their cars, parking was a pain in the ass and I was terrible about filling the gas tank. I preferred to walk. Everywhere. And No One required me to justify it. Or make the I got home safely call. I never got the half-eyebrow.

I write a lot about walking. It is my rhythm, it is how I see the world, it is my preferred method of transportation. I dream of walking tours and vacations that are pilgrimages and Hadrian's Wall and boots and light packs and no cameras and notebooks, because that's how I love the world the best. On the ground. Between my feet and their motion, in the sounds of the street level debris and the relative non-existence of passers-by.

So, I am here now, closer to 40 than my folks want to admit. In this very small town. I got a part-time job. I walk to it. It's about 8 blocks. Not 8 Chicago blocks, mind, these are short. And EveryOne is Concerned. Ev-e-Ry-One. All Of Them. Even the People Who Raised Me.

The walk is nice and sort of surreal. I cross the town square, go to the other side of town, if you will. There are street lights every four feet and wide sidewalks with easy to see cracks and gullys for safer navigation. I can stare in the empty storefronts and add something a little bit odd, a little bit not quite right to this deeply sensible little village. The stoplights tell me when to go and when to not go. I ignore them.

It is not over-confidence, it is simply that I will not have my life circumscribed based on someone else's ideas of propriety and routine. Safety is a thing that gets in my way more than it allows me live freely. High heels do not exist in my wardrobe. I know how to carry my keys for maximum blood-letting and also, I talk to myself at moments, just to maintain distance between me and, oh, everyone else.

Being a pedestrian is no longer about just getting somewhere unnoticed. I am aware of everything that goes on around me, from insects to pennies on the ground to just how many things besides driving the person at the green light is doing. I see the town, the city, the trees, the view.

I get home safely.