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A shot taken from my sleeping bag on our Memorial Day camping trip. I can never sleep on those Fridays, from sinus trouble and snoring. But we have so much coffee, it’s not a big deal. It’s my favorite camping trip of the year.
Photo Friday: Dead of Night.
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Aside from 1998, I have never ever been shopping on the day after Thanksgiving. Even then I only went because my then girlfriend (now wife) was home from school for a few days, and I didn’t want to miss any of it. It was not fun. So I continued to participate in what we’d been doing for a few years before. Namely, a sort of Black Friday retreat.
This year, we went to Harper’s Ferry, West Virginia, adopted home of one of my favorite revolutionaries, John Brown. It was a chilly but sunny day, like it was the last time we retreated there in 2002. Then, I was sick and in the final year of my masters’ program. I had no idea where I’d be living the following year. I entertained thoughts of small town life because Harper’s Ferry seemed like such a nice place. Like 2002, I carried a small messenger bag, rather than a backpack.
We were in search of the hot cinnamon rolls from five years ago, served hot with icing ladled onto them. But the shop was closed, so we settled for lesser treats and coffee at the place where you’ve had coffee, too, if you’ve been to Harper’s Ferry in the last ten years. We took in a few historical sites and embarked for the trail to Maryland Heights. We walked across the bridge on which I bragged about traveling by train. Zack and I led the hike, which went well. The cool air was refreshing, but we all got a little sweaty climbing the steep trail. At the overlook, the wind was whipping up, and being sweaty was, well, chilly. I ate my lunch standing up to avoid numb butt. The gusts were blowing the Goldfish Crackers out of my hand. In 2002, someone nearly launched himself from the cliff going after a Clementine Zack tossed to him. Every year, Zack brings an entire box of Clementines in his backpack. Going back down the trail took less than a half hour because we were almost jogging. My legs felt good because they take me everywhere, but the jostling on the way down hurt my knees and my full bladder. It was a relaxing day, and I had found my mouth harp and had taken it along for amusement. My face hurt at night from the wind and from laughing. We had pizza and Maryland-made wine when we got back to Baltimore.
Back in 2004 when I started blogging and even earlier in 2003, when I lived in Boston and flirted with the idea and started really reading blogs, I liked a certain kind of blog. The author would be a fan of Amelie. Tea/coffee. Fancy notebooks. A Mac or otherwise non-standard computer. Funky glasses. No cussing. Only nice things to say. Fondness for books, especially poetry. Sharing recipes. I was joking one time that there was a uniform for the Cuddlebloggers: Amelie soundtrack, Moleskine, Timbuk2 bag, gel pens or, better, a fountain pen with some obscure color of ink in it like Nipple of Venus Rose Pink. I formerly identified some Cuddlebloggers as hipsters (read here), but it has lasted far long enough to be official in some way. I think.
I don’t mean this in a bad way, really. I have so many Moleskines that I need a shelf. Not to mention my affection for Amelie and utter and complete caffeine addiction. I’m just saying is all. And, to be sure, I totally tried to be a Cuddleblogger at first, whether I realized it or not. Until our car wreck, that is, when I let loose with my first naughty language (here). That sumbitch in the land-yacht changed everything for us, literally knocking us out of a pattern of contentment that was leading us to somewhere we did not want to be. But that’s another story.
I like making up words and definitions. Cuddleblogger. You know what I’m talking about, though they are certainly a dying breed. I’m hard pressed to think of more than one or two who still blogs regularly. And I miss them.
This is posting in the future, when I’ll be off to Harper’s Ferry for a nice day trip and hike up to Maryland Heights. I went there the day after Thanksgiving in 2002, too, and they had homemade cinnamon rolls with fresh icing poured generously with a ladle at the ice-cream shop. It was cold, and the plates of heaven steamed on the porch when I confessed to a friend of mine that I was a vegetarian.
Happy Thanksgiving, and safe travels to all. I might have the shortest traveling to do: 3/4 of a mile down the street to where my family lives. I love Baltimore.
National Novel Writing Month has been draining me this month, hence the relative lack of posts. I have a little widget with my word count on the right. I took some advice and told everyone what I was doing. Sheer shame will keep me going, I know it. I am caught up enough to take off Thursday and Friday and then get the last ten thousand words out next week. I need a break. Writing is much harder work than I thought it would be. And the constant caffeine can’t be healthy for me.
But it’s good to actually do something I’ve been meaning to do since I was a junior in high school, late in the year, when my English teacher called me “deep” and told me she thought I could write. Even if she was wrong, even if it never gets published, I can say that I wrote a novel once. I think it has officially surpassed my dissertation in length, becoming the longest thing I have ever written. And the chapters fit together much better than the diss.
[That photo is in a hotel in New Haven, CT. I thought of it because it was featured on Moleskinerie today. I rarely buy bottled water these days, honest, despite a lust for bubbly wasser.]
You know how people say bad things happen in threes? Like funerals/deaths? My dad hit a deer last week. Rather, the deer hit him in my brother’s spare car, a Cougar. My dad was fine, and the damage to the car was not huge. That is, until you think about the fact that a living, warm-blooded creature that could feel pain caused it. Ouch. Fur stuck between the rim at the tire. The blood washed off before I saw it.
Then this week, some nut ran a red light and caused nearly six grand in damage to my mom’s Mustang. If, of course, the body work turns out to be all that’s wrong. She was fine, and it will make a good story about Baltimore City residents sticking together, which I’ll have to share later. He hit the rear wheel and trashed literally the entire ride side of the body, and the Mustang has a solid rear end. Could be bad. She got a rental car. A certain base model BOS that I won’t name. Also red.
Then she had an accident in that thing yesterday. Nothing bad, really. No one was hurt or anything, no serious damage, it seems.
My family had their three now. Honestly, we were all waiting for the third to happen. I’m glad it’s over. I was afraid to ride my bike. Remember that fortune teller that said she saw me in a “crash” that did not involve a car. She never said I’d be Okay. But she also said I’d be in Germany right now with my brother and would have gotten a job in September. Instead, I have time to write a novel in November and then think about the fact that I have time to write a novel in a month.
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From when I went to Boston last fall. On our first full day there, the Mrs. was at Harvard doing research. I stayed at the hotel in Quincy and did some work of my own. We were at the hotel where we stayed in 2001 when we came up apartment hunting before we moved there. It was near where we wound up living. My old hood. It was a nice little neighborhood for walking, and our apartment community was a block from the beach. I used to take the long way back from everywhere except class (it took nearly two hours to get home from Boston College via walking and the subway) because I liked the neighborhood.
That day, in the hotel, I could not stand the idea of what was outside. So I put on my mp3 player and took a walk through North Quincy. I took my favorite walk from the subway to our apartment but could not get any photos in the courtyard because of a lady walking too close behind me and her badly behaving kid. I walked through, went to the beach and took photos. Walked down my old street, down my favorite long way to get to the subway in the fall. I used to listen to Tori Amos’ Scarlet’s Walk on those walks in the fall of 2002. Applying to PhD programs, having no idea where we would be the next fall. Scary at the time, but exciting, I guess.
We had a neat balcony that caught indirect sunlight in the afternoon and had a weird blue glue. I liked to sit at the little bistro table we had and drink tea whenever I could be home a half hour before sunset. The planes on the way to Logan passed overhead very lowly and slowly several times a minute. I could see everyone coming home from work, getting a hug. The best hug they’d get all day. Putting on bathrobes and flannel things and making dinner, eating, relaxing.
I miss my last year in Boston pretty often. But then I was always pining for Baltimore. I always got on Amtrak excited to see my friends and family and favorite city. I’m where I want to be, and I think my affection for 2002-2003 has more to do with other things than a quiet little shore community in Quincy.
Photo Friday: Travel.
Rode bikes to The Charles today to see The Darjeeling Limited, the only place in town it seems to be playing. It was cold and grey, and I totally pulled a muscle in my special area on the way. But it was totally worth it. If you’re a fan of Wes Anderson, you’ll love it. Jason Schwarzman helped write it. Bill Murray is in it for a minute. Personally, I prefer Luke to Owen Wilson, for humor, but Adrien Brody was fantastic as the sentimental brother. I don’t want to say more, to give it away, other than to say that it was very unlike The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, which I liked a lot but many people seem to have hated. About the latter, I say, a “bad” Wes Anderson movie is better than a lot of “good” movies I’ve seen.
Eight fire trucks, one with a ladder. Two SUVs. One helicopter. That’s what you get if you have an expensive duplex in Roland Park. No smoke. No police. No ambulance. They hooked up two hoses, had those spear things and full suits and went into the house. You could see them through the second and third story windows. But then they left, and I have no idea what was going on.
[Larger and more photos at Flickr.]
Photo Friday: Dangerous.
NaNoWriMo is coming along. I’m nearly at a third to the goal. I am having trouble not making the characters in it look like they are people I know or knew. I know Hemingway pissed off a lot of people by making characters out of them. I am, officially, not doing that. The first-person narrator is not even me.
I wrote a scene today which was set in a fictional strip club in Baltimore called Squiggles. That was weird, when I have never even been to one. Describing body parts was strange, too. Naturally, however, comes the sailer language. And the narrator’s preference for, shall we say, “good” bee.
I’ve been cooking a lot, too. I’m trying to master vegetarian chili, which usually takes like bland beans. I have some homemade pasta sauce simmering, too.
I need to find a job.
We had a higher turn-out than expected. It was going to only be Dan and myself. But F came along, too, which was awesome. We had our normal lights on, and Dan had a lit-up pumpkin on his rack, sporting an orange glow of holiday flavor. Of course, we all drank coffee before we met at the Water Tower. I brought candy which, if you said the magic words, I would give to people on bikes. Both of them. I sported a cool shirt that said, “Quoth the Raven, Baltimore!” and “Forever More!” on the back. It was a gift from the Baltimore Book Festival in 1997.
We met at the Water Tower (where we always meet) and took a zippy ride down Spring Lake, dinging our bells at the kiddies out Trick-or-Treating. These days, there are disappointingly few kids out doing that, but there were tons around Homeland. Maybe the folks in the big houses of Homeland give out the best candy. They sure gave us a lot of smiles and waves.
We elicited a lot of comments like, “Cool, a Halloween bike ride!” and “Cool bikes!” I’m surprised that it was so surprising to see people on bikes in Baltimore, since it is really becoming a more commonplace thing to see nowadays, especially in North Baltimore. But it was nice that people noticed.
We rode through some alleys, dodged some traffic and scored iced-coffee and iced-tea, which we enjoyed in the quad at Hopkins. Added boost. We rode through Hampden and back up to the Water Tower. It was damned gleeful!
Maybe we can do one for Thanksgiving and/or Christmas. New Years would be fun, but there are, frankly, too many drunken idiots out that night.
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I don’t mean to be hokey, corny, stale, etc. But you know, I think it’s complete crap that those of us who don’t support the war let those who do, those with four of those ribbon magnets on their cars, own patriotism. I’ve said that before.
I don’t support the war or several of the things my country chooses to do. But I still love my country. So forgive me if I select just one thing the US stands for, and post it for Photo Friday: Strength.