SONGS OF YOURSELF

In days of yore was the heyday of the troubador, that traveling bard, that singer and tale teller who regaled village after village with news and ideas and dearly loved stories that never grew old. His coming was remarkable in and of itself; his ability to transform the village green or tavern or throne room where he played into another world entirely made of him a treasure. He could make anyone forget himself awhile as they heard old, old favorites and new little nuggets of his own making with equal credulity, openness, love.

I'm inviting you all to come and hear a 21st century troubador sing. His name is Warren Keldsen, and if he can transform the evening I just had, imagine the wonders he can work for you.

Not everyone is going to react to Warren the way I did; a lot of why he "rang psychic cherries" with me (in David Foster Wallace's phrase) in the Lazy River Cantina Friday night and tonight is based on his choice of songs, his taste in material to cover. With the exception of an unfortunate (but audience-demanded) Jimmy Buffet piece, his every selection was something which spoke to me, of the past, the present, the future that could be or the future that could have been. Good songs, warm and emotional in and of themselves, but given new colors by the way this boy sang them (to be honest, even the ridiculous "Wasted Away in Margaritaville" seemed quietly meditative and worth hearing when he sang it; had I not the instant gut-level hatred of the tune that I have, I might even have enjoyed this). His voice is warm and quiet and intimate, and his style of performing engages absolutely everyone in the room on a personal level so that upwards of 40 people could each believe he was singing to him or her and him or her alone.

He has, too, that undervalued but invaluable talent for gauging exactly when to pull off a "wow" stunt to wake up the distracted drinkers in his midst. He might suddenly pull his guitar behind his head and play backwards, or he might just pull a Hendrix and play it with his teeth or he might just wander out into his audience, or he might just suddenly quiet things down to a whisper. Whatever he does, it's always just what was needed to bring us all back into rapport with him.

Beethoven supposedly once remarked that good music is like hypnotism in its ability to dominate the listener's mind and draw it into the state of the composer's, the performer's. Keldsen has more than a little of this quality, but it never feels like domination or even like seduction (though his Dave Matthews-flavored vocals are very seductive). It's more like sympathy. He has no idea what specific cares a listener has brought into the room where he is playing, and doesn't need to. He can work an alchemy to make them into if not joys than at least things that can be accepted, if not transcended.

I've been to a lot of fucking amazing live performances in my day, seen luminaries like Juliana Hatfield and my beloved King's X and the wryly hilarious Dead Milkmen and the incendiary Sam Black Church and the overwhelming Only Living Witness (not to mention the trippy, hippy Phish) in venues the size of Saratoga's own Lazy River Cantina, but I've never before felt the way this one guy, with his little guitar and his harmonicas and his voice, made me feel this evening. I walked in the door agitated after a street dance plagued with too many cops, too much trash, and music that I was sick of about six if not 14 years ago (the opening trio excepted; that stuff I could stand to hear more of, but please, no more AC/DC covers ever), not to mention plenty of people who were unshakingly convinced that all of the above was somehow my fault.

I left with a wholly different sense of enjoyment and calm and readiness to accept whatever came my way that is really pretty new to me. I had spent two or more hours simply watching and listening to another person pouring out his heart, to me alone it often seemed. Sometimes I sang along with him, sometimes I just sat there silently staring into that quiet middle space between myself and the rest of the world, forgetting myself completely and just serenely, yet passionately, being alive.

Thank you, Warren. Please come again, and often.

ON THE TABLE

I have an ancient-looking, overconstructed, 25-ton monster of a picnic table that my own dear personal grandfather built back in the 1970s sitting now in my backyard. I have a lot of funky heirlooms from him, a man who took regular trips to the dump and came back with more than he took out, a haunter of junk shops and trashday curbs. I have a collection of stunning photos of San Francisco Bay taken before and after the Golden Gate Bridge (my mother's twin sister; she was born in San Francisco the day it opened to car traffic) (now she'll be mad because I've hinted at her age) was built, I have an odd little "fairy" silhouette, I have a funky mechanical bank in the form of a green elephant (the thing to do is to put a coin in its trunk and then press down on its tail to make the trunk move upward to toss the coin into the head), I have a tiny piece of Staffordshire porcelain that has survived both his life and mine... but the picnic table... the picnic table...

How many good summer gatherings has this table seen? When I was a child all of the highway patrolmen in the area used to bring their families to at least one big barbecue in my parents' yard. We'd eat at that table in shifts, the kids wandering off to run through the sprinkler or play on the swings or play badminton (nothing is better for raising a neighborhood of happy kids than at least one good big yard, and ours was it). I used one of the long, sturdy benches for sunbathing back when I was still deluded enough to think I could tan. My graduation dinner was at that table, as was my sister's.

Now the table is mine; since my father built a deck onto his house and set up new patio furniture there, the old picnic table was consigned to leaning up against the far back fence, where it would be in the way of the lawnmower as little as possible.

I'm delighted beyond words to give it a home. It was hell beyond words humping that plutonium-dense thing down the hill and across the water, but I'm delighted to give it a home.

The years have taken their toll on it, though. It's as solid as ever, but as my splintered hands told me when we moved it, it needed some TLC. Scraping, sanding, new paint.

Scraping soon seemed a redundancy; nightly gatherings on my lawn on the river saw sometimes as many as eight people gathered at the table, idly peeling off long strips of ancient redwood paint as we talked and sipped and stared out at the water or watched the birds at the feeder (more about them in a minute!) (grr!). With each passing night, my poor table was the worse for the wear, its ancient grey wood exposed to the surprise rainstorms and the targeting apparatus of the birds recycling their seed (see?).

So I decided this week to give it the care it had long needed, bought some scrapers and brushes and a gallon of paint in a color called "Warm Port" (trust me to go for the wine shade. But I fell for the color itself before the name, honest! It's a beautiful, rich hue, and I'm glad as hell I have a lot of leftover paint. I just have, now, to pick a wall...). I dropped them off, went to work, figured my summer guest, Erin-Go-Braless, the Punk Martha Stewart, and I could scrape the table Friday evening, paint it Saturday (today), and be enjoying it after the conclusion of this weekend's arts festival Sunday.

I spoke better than I knew when I called her the Punk Martha Stewart, however, because when I came home from work yesterday in a desperate rush – I had to shower and change and girl up for the arts festival gala! – my grandfather's table was almost unrecognizable in its new coats of paint. It's gorgeous. And it was already about half dry!

I might have let myself be put out that I didn't get to work on grandpa's table myself, but I realized that my friend had done this out of love for me and for my home, and in the process had given me a whole new reason to cherish this table (yes, sentimental of me, but we writers often are, you know). I'll never be able to look at it without thinking of my crazy grandfather, my best friend and his fiance who ate their first meal in Saratoga there, and the Punk Martha Stewart. That's pretty amazing.

And just as an aside, that color was really the perfect choice. I can't wait for my parents to see it, they who have forever forbidden me from choosing paint colors for their place after I fell for Teton Blue while we were getting ready to re-do their bedroom. The shade was lovely, a perfect aqua (my mother's favorite color) but what looked bright and somewhat airy on the card was very, very deep on their walls and made of their already poorly lit bedroom a cave that my father does admit was "great for sleeping late" but otherwise just didn't do at all! Perhaps I have redeemed myself with grandpa's table.

Of course, by the time they get back from vacation, it will be despicably speckled by those damnable, ungrateful birds. Do you think they'd get the hint if I cut off their seed supply for a day or two?

MUSINGS ON THE FOURTH

I often joke, somewhat darkly, that our survival as a town is still too dependent on our ability to seduce people from far away into coming here and leaving their money behind. I've often felt a little icky about this, both for what it says about the sustainability of the very enjoyable lives we've all built here and for the feeling I sometimes get that I'm picking people's pockets (then I think well, otherwise they'd be spending that money to make The Mouse's stockholders richer or something and I feel a little better).

Speaking of The Mouse, I'm sure Disneyland's hokey, sad, vaguely spooky "Main Street USA" put on a helluva Fourth of July yesterday, but it had nothing on ours. It was one of the longest parades in Saratoga history (the only two longer ones in recent memory – by which I mean my memory, of course – were the bicentennial parade in 1976 and Saratoga's centennial parade in 1986, the latter involving pretty much every single resident in the town in some fashion, 2000 people all throwing candy at like one tourist family's children. It was awesome), followed by one of the best shootouts (though perhaps not as enjoyable for some, i.e. me, who had to observe most of it out of "dead" eyes sprawled out in a very warm and heavy "period" dress on hot asphalt in the middle of the street. There was actually a puddle of sweat on the pavement when I got up after the shenanigans were over!) (yes, of course it was sweat, don't be ridiculous!). And while once again it seemed like everyone who lives here was in the parade in some fashion (most of my coffee buddies turned out with the "Saratoga Hookers and Slicers" the meaning of whose name I'll leave to your imaginations to decipher, dear readers), there were still happy throngs all along the street, and a monster crowd for the shootout.

I missed the beginning of the parade for reasons I'll get to in a moment, but I've been told by visitors and locals alike that it was very emotional for all when the American Legion's color guard started things off, and the town together said the Pledge of Allegiance at the intersection of Bridge Street and the highway. We really do have something to thank Osama for, I think, all humor aside. In a town that often acts as though the world sort of drops away at the city limits sign, it's always a remarkable and a wonderful surprise to be reminded in this way that we are, indeed, part of something larger and greater than our fun little town.

I wish I could have seen it.

Unfortunately, somehow or other some wires got crossed between me and the General (not her real name), the tall and stately, no-nonsense redhead who takes charge and gets the parade entries lined up for both this and our yearly Christmas parades. She told me I had done a pretty good job on my preliminary line-up (a copy of which I had already thoughtfully provided to our parade announcer), but there were some changes needed to be made (including the relocation of the enormous, 16-vehicle "Hoem Fleet", who lined themselves up on a different side street from the one the General and I had decided they should and so, for clarity's sake, needed a whole different position in the parade line-up). We made them, scribbling furiously on my list (thank goodness I left huge spaces between entries).

Then it was 10:50 a.m., time for the final check-over. I had my bicycle, so logically I was the one to do it. With my list in one hand and the bag with the shoot-out costume balanced on my shoulder, I began my ride from the front to the back of the 48-entry line-up. Check, check, check, oh, they're still out of order but it doesn't matter, I can explain it to the announcer, check, check... oh my god, they're moving up! They're going to smoosh one another! But no! They're turning onto the street up there! Oh god! She's started the parade already!

So, like the wicked witch of the west, I began the ride of my life, down little-used back streets, through alleys, over lawns... I actually jumped a very small jump on my bike for the first time ever, my skirts billowing outwards and showing the feral cats my gams as I flew along. I believe I even broke the speed limit, but shh!

Of course the announcer had to make a witty remark about my approach.

I didn't notice the crowds until I was ensconced in the back of his pickup, ready to be his nomenclatura. What crowds! Some familiar faces, but most I had never seen before. People had traveled from far and wide to watch us celebrate the Fourth!

And then I realized what a powerful thing it is to these people, just knowing we are here. They can only come for a week or two to enjoy what we take for granted, but the knowledge that we exist, that somewhere a real small town still functions and works together and is full of people who feel genuine friendship for one another and are ready to act quite ridiculously in public to share that... it sustains those who have to work and live far away and can only dream about us. We are the keepers of this last, semi-imaginary world that was once considered the quintessence of American life. And at no time is this more evident than on the Fourth of July, parade, shoot-out, watermelons and all.

It's good to be here.

INSTEAD OF 100 FEET OF THE ZCHIZZ...

"Celebrate your country's independence by blowing up a small part of it!"
- Apu from the Simpsons

Well, for obvious reasons there aren't going to be a lot of fireworks in Saratoga this year, surrounded as we are on three sides by the Medicine Bow National Forest (the biggest and one of the oldest of those) and bounded on the fourth side by high, dry sagebrush flats. We get some – that summer camp for spoiled grown ups, the Old Baldy Club, has twisted some county-level arms and gotten a permit for its traditional display (which we less spoiled grown-ups watch in happy drunken comfort from the porch of the Whistle Pig Saloon south of town – a bar with a view is a fine, fine thing).

Most of those twisted county-level arms will be waving from cars of various vintages in my parade in a few hours (I say "my" parade because pretty much all I've done the last few weeks is make phone calls, fill out street closure permits, try to keep our zealous police chief from harassing the Sierra Madre Muzzleloaders plumb out of the line-up – traditionally they fire off their black powder rifles, and there is of course an anti-firearms ordinance on the books! – and persuade clubs, organizations, businesses and assorted other weirdos to enter the thing). It's an election year for two county commissioners, the county clerk, the county attorney, the county assessor, the county coroner (but strangely, as usual, no one wants his job), the clerk of district court, the county treasurer... also for Saratoga's mayor and two council seats (not mine, mercifully. I'm not sure I could run this rodeo and campaign too. How I'll do it in two years I don't know. Maybe by then my hobo dreams will have come true)... might actually be three council seats, since a third member of our council has decided he needs to be county treasurer and is running for that... but I digress.

There are five different mounted groups, but fortunately no one marching, so no one's shoes will be soiled from stepping in road apples.

Once again, I have failed to find us a marching band. The high school kids are all scattered at various sports camps and summer jobs, and the various and sundry amateur bluegrass, rock, country and jug bands that occasionally play out here could none of them be persuaded to march. Okay, I fibbed about the jug bands; there aren't any. But wouldn't it be cool if there was one?

There is a bevy of antique and classic cars. There is an avenue of flags. As far as I know, there is no one planning to wander through the parade this year with a bustle and a super soaker, but parade crashers do happen, they do...

And apres le parade, we have us a cowboy shoot-out, once again featuring your humble blogger. This year's theme is selling off surplus girls from one of the many whorehouses that comprise some of the more colorful elements of Saratoga's past. It's a whole wacky slate of amateur dramatics culminating in violent simulated death for many, including me! So far, the police chief has been too busy picking on the muzzleloaders to turn his attention to us – we use real pistols with blanks (and don't think the fate of Brandon Lee isn't on my mind as I stare down the gun barrel wielded by my tiny accountant...)

As for whom I'm playing, that is still a secret. Last year, I played the Sewer King's grandmother (I'm sure the resemblance was astonishing) (basically, I pretended I was his mom, whom everyone assures me is turning out just like dear old Pearl) in a re-creation of Saratoga's one and only bank robbery, which had taken place 75 years previously. She was a witness and kept her cool and even gave a detailed report to the ding-a-ling newspaper reporter who had been busy writing bad poetry through the actual incident (according to the script).

How in the world am I going to top that? Well, I'll tell you later. Rex Cloacae wanted to know but is blowing off the whole thing to play golf, and if he thinks he's going to find out here well nanny nanny boo boo to him and any of you others he might have deputized to spy it out!

And after the shoot-out? I've got a date with some politicos to hoist some pints in a local pub. Even I get an afternoon off once in a while... If you can call drinking with county official wannabes a day off...

SMALL WORLD MOMENT...BIG TIME!

Lesson to my out-of-state readers out there: If you know one person from Wyoming, you pretty much have a direct connection to everyone else from here. The old saw about six degrees of separation between one person and everyone else on the planet is maybe a two-degree pocket knife for us.

Case in point: A dude in Chicago, whom I have never met personally but with whom I've been arguing ridiculously for many years in the fabulous forum that is Secular Johnson, recently hosted an NBA draft party (I know, it's hard for me to believe, too, but some people are so sports-crazed that they organize parties to watch, e.g., contract signings for new players, press conferences about niggling little rule changes, and player drafts. And most of whom, it seems, I know in some fashion. Ironic for someone who only watches sports every four years, isn't it?), the hilarious photos from which one of the party-goers, Brickyard (not his real name), threw up on a web page for us to gape at today.

I know almost all of these people personally and do miss them very much the 51 weeks out of the year when I'm not with them, so naturally I surfed over to have a look.

There was one handsome dude in one of the pictures whom I simultaneously did and did not recognize. It drove me crazy. I know everyone on Secular Johnson (affectionatly known as "the 'J") by sight at least, even the ones I haven't met, because we're always sharing wacky photos – but this guy has never made a 'J shot yet. So he must be just some random NBA fan the guys know, right?

Well, yes and no.

See, finally I just had to know who the hell he was. There was something about him (besides his comely appearance and obvious good taste – while everyone else in the photos was drinking Rolling Rock or some similar swill, this man was elegantly quaffing a Newcastle Brown Ale).

The reply came back a while later. His name is Ron, and he's from Wyoming!

Whoa!

A little later, the newest member of Secular Johnson, Angie Warhol (LIANT readers may recall her as the old friend from miserable adolescence who recently tracked down this website, and thus your humble correspondent, via Google) chimed in, with something of a non-sequitir, namely, did he go to Princeton?

Well yes, yes he did. Why in the world did she ask?

Well, Ms. Warhol was more on the ball than I was. Having HSI (Nerd Camp) on the brain as she did, she immediately made the connection that I would have found absurd though I guess I shouldn't find it so these days after simultaneous surprise visits from Erin-Go-Braless, FutureGrrl, Tron and Toughpacque Bougur, right?

This guy was one of our "peer counselors" at Nerd Camp!

So, as I say, if you know one of us, chances are you know us all. Which means that you, too, can claim acquaintance and possibly ask the odd favor of our current Vice President, who used to share campaign fundraisers with my own dear personal dad back in the day.

Just do me a favor and don't mention my name when you do. Use Ron's! Uncle Richard always did like him best.

SO, I AM SURE...

That you've all been eagerly waiting to hear the outcome of the meeting of the minds that took place on the porch last night, right? Well, wonder no further.

We, um, wrote a song. For that band in Chicago to play. Soon it will be a worldwide hit. Your children will be singing it. Really.


REVERSE JESUS

I was born up in a palace
To a skanky whore named Alice,
Guzzling whisky from a chalice
That was shaped just like a... cup.

I never left Chicago
And I'm stinky with bravado
And I never talk to God, though
I know where to look him up.

Oh, there are so many reasons
Why I am REVERSE JESUS

I turn wine back into water
And I love "Welcome Back Kotter"
When I play on teeter totters
I just fall down on the job.

I like to beat up kids
And I don't hang out with Yids.
I wear makeup on my eyelids
And enjoy corn on the cob.

Oh, there are so many reasons
Why I am REVERSE JESUS

I turn bread back into stones
And I'm bound to jump your bones.
But right now I have a jones
For some pork skins and a beer.

My blessings are like curses
And I never talk in verses.
Instead I ride in hearses,
Where I gamble, flirt and leer.

Oh, there are so many reasons
Why I am REVERSE JESUS!

I was born on Easter Sunday,
And I'll die on Christmas Monday
And I know that there'll be one day
When I'll kick some Roman ass!

I'll get drunk with Pontius Pilate
And we'll cause a little riot
And completely blow our diet,
Eating, farting, being crass.

Oh, there are so many reasons
Why I am REVERSE JESUS!

Then to Herod's house I'll roll
To turn diamonds into coal.
And we'll both just smoke a bowl
And I'll walk underneath his lake.

But he told me something funny.
Says he's running out of money.
But I told him hey now, honey,
Life is fine, we're on the take.

Oh, there are so many reasons
Why I am REVERSE JESUS

We'll just call up all our wives
We'll have the time of all our lives
Selling Ronco Ginsu knives
And making prank calls to the Pope.

Yes, Reverse Jesus is my name
And I do not want your fame.
And think disciples LAME.
Now go pee up a rope.

Oh, there are so many reasons
Why I am REVERSE JESUS!

QUICK AND DIRTY...

...And probably about to get dirtier.

It's the last Friday in June and no one I know has accomplished anything of worth today, not even the golfers (it's windy and kind of clouded over, with the ever-present teasing threat of rain but yeah right), and I'm ten minutes away from racing home to shower off the sweat of the day (it's hard work sitting here reading e-mail and doing stupid bookkeeping chores) and get girled up a bit for a hard night's holding down the floorboards on the porch of the sometimes-famous Saratoga Inn home of some of the state's finest microbrew (and he has the trophies to prove it, does our pal E.J. Allen, all praise be to his name) and some really comfortable adirondack chairs.

And it's going to get stupid out, because accompanying me are a whole flotilla of friends from other places who suddenly, magically appeared here this week without warning, including FutureGrrrl, Tron, Erin-Go-Braless (not their real names) and, I just learned, yet another special guest star, Toughpacque Bougur, sometime drummer for the greatest rock band in the world (and the only ones ever to record songs I wrote, namely one about Saratoga's own Donut Ranch and, well, another one), Gyrating Bhtch.

Just another crappy evening in paradise...

TOURISTS AND OTHER GENIUSES...

This is... perhaps a little painful to write about since I’m pretty much supposed to be nice to tourists for a living, but sometimes one just has to shout out something rude and inappropriate from the rooftops...

...Unless one has a weblog!

Last week I came upon a local outfitter friend of mine, we’ll call him Johnboat (not his real name), sitting chuckling ruefully to himself over a bottle of canoe beer. He’d just gotten done telling Oscar the Grouchy Bartender (not his real name) a real whopper, one that he considered the best Stupid Tourist Quote ever.

“Kate,” he said to me, still sort of snorting and trying hard not to snarf his beer, “You’ll appreciate this.

“True story.

“I am SO not making this up.

“Really. This really happened.”

“OK, Johnboat, I’m ready. Tell me what really happened,” I said, or words to that effect.

“I took a group of people down the river today, and this one guy, this real know it all, who was driving his wife crazy showing her how to tie really bad knots and giving her horrible casting advice to cover up the fact that she was catching more fish than he was – you know the type I’m talking about...”

I nodded, watching Oscar still sputtering, too. This must be some story, I remember thinking.

“Well, as we were pulling out at Foote, he came over to me – and by the way, the bastard never did tip me – and said... he said...”

(Pause while Johnboat collected himself once again and Oscar, turning pink, had to leave the vicinity – he may have been making for the bathroom. This must be some punchline, I remember thinking)

“Hey John, hunter to hunter, you can tell me ‘cause I have a pretty good idea already: at what elevation in this part of the state do the mule deer turn into elk?”

Well, it took me a while to recover from this remark, which smacked me on the noggin and left me sort of stunned with my eyes whirling like those dealies in a slot machine, but then I had to burst his bubble.

I had a better one, you see.

A visitor had come into my office that same afternoon who was really eager to know what our utility bills are for heating the hot pool! No really! I could tell him! He was sure it would be very hard for me to justify such a staggering sum, to my constituents but I could trust him not to reveal it to any of them!

He left very angrily after repeated attempts on my part to explain to him that the changing rooms, like our downtown sidwalks, are geothermally heated. That wasn’t the point, you see. He wanted to know what it cost to heat the water in the pool.

Oscar and Johnboat agreed that this was even better.

Then Johnboat challenged me to a friendly game of billiards, which I of course lost handily (but with great aplomb) and the story just sort of peters out from there...

...Until today. When I finally drifted into my office at my usual shamefully late hour, there was a man at my desk, a man who looked sort of familiar. I’m not 100% on this, but I’m pretty sure it was my interrogator of the previous week! And he was using my computer!

(Note to out of town readers: Since no retail business downtown has yet cottoned on to the potential increase in foot traffic that would be afforded by providing public e-mail access in a store [HINT HINT HINT] [Hopeless, I know, but I’ve got to keep trying], the chamber office offers this service)

And he used it for a very long time.

And finally, he left, paying over his customary $5 (yes, people! E-mail has become such a preoccupation with travelers that most of them will PAY just for a chance to check it! HINT HINT HINT!) and winking as he bid us cheery-bye.

I sat down to get to work... and he had left FIVE browser windows open. He was still logged in to his Yahoo! account, his amazon.com account, his PAYPAL account, his Expedia account, and something else that I didn’t really note because I was still too stunned that this guy had basically given me carte blanche to spend all his money and ruin his credit rating and mess up his Amazon recommendations forever more!

Fortunately for him (I should get my head examined) I am honest. Fortunately for him (seriously, somebody smack me), I closed all of those windows with alacrity. Fortunately for him.

But on a serious note, I want all of you to know how welcome you are to come and visit Saratoga. We love you. Really. We want you to come. I want you to come. I’ll even let you sleep on my couch. Really. Please come. Don’t be mad. I didn’t mean it. Of course YOU aren’t dumb like them. You’re lovely. You’re wonderful. When you come to town, you will be greeted by the voices of a heavenly choir (and it will be heavenly, because the tenor section will be in the bar quaffing Guiness, most likely. It’s summer, after all, and the business of apologizing to tourists, playing directory assistance, giving directions and selling rubber racing ducks is thirsty work) singing you down the street. Come. Visit. The air is like perfume and we don’t have any smoke. Our river is full of water, which is full of fish which periodically stick their heads out of the water and ask us when YOU, yes YOU, are coming to catch them. They are practicing their graceful, spectacular leaps right into your cooler!

And in this part of the state, at the elevation of about 12,000 feet, they turn into mako sharks. Really.

OOH, FOUL TEMPTATION!

No, this is not another plug for a semi-pornographic blog, it’s a genuine cry for help, or at least advice, from my dear readers.

The website to which I directed your attention earlier today (IntroducingMonday.co.uk) has given me a truly wicked idea, one which I have the resources to reify if I so choose.

Many of you who know me personally are aware that tomorrow is my “hobo-versary,” the first anniversary of my disgruntled departure from a certain local media outlet. Many of you drank with me as part of my traveling hobo party; others urged me to start my own magazine or something to compete with this media outlet. At the time I had other plans (mostly breaking my own tequila consumption record)...

Today, though, gave me a fun, wicked, naughty puss of an idea.

As of today, June 24, 2002, no one has registered any of the following domains:

saratogasun.com

saratogasun.net

saratogasun.org

etc.

I could easily jump a certain someone’s unexploited claim on these and many other related domains and do a “la la la” or just use it to host this here blog or use it to keep track of this august media outlet's mistakes or... well, there’s just no end to the pettiness in which I could engage.

Of course, if I thought that certain someone was ever really going to follow through on his plans to take the thing online, I would just content myself with cybersquatting and wait for him to come to me and see how much I could wring out of him... but since I don’t think so, that wouldn’t profit me much or be much fun.

So, help me out, dear readers. Should I take the high road and tell the little devils sitting on both of my shoulders (the angel who belongs on the right side gave up in disgust back when I was still a teen) to feck off?

Or should I have some fun?

If you vote for the latter, what would you like to see in my La La La site?

Share your thoughts by clicking HERE and e-mailing me.

Please?

I need you.

MEANWHILE, AT GAMES DESIGN HEADQUARTERS... LA LA LA...


...As my Able Assistant (not her real name) was discovering the pleasures of the Greatest Cybersquatter Ever, (whose signature ditty we sang out loud at the Hotel Wolf this afternoon. It’s a catchy tune, la la la), I invented a brand new game, and I’m very excited about it.

From the maniacs who brought you Big Game Paintball comes the hot new craze sure to be sweeping offices all over downtown Saratoga in a matter of hours,

DOGGIE SOCCER

All you need is a few dozen Golfy Goof balls (if none of these are at hand, ordinary hand balls or anything else that’s bouncy and vaguely round will do in a pinch) and two or more highly energetic dogs. Set up goals at either end of your store or office.

It’s you versus the dogs, with dogs acting as both midfielders and goalkeepers. Your aim is to get that ball into the goals – either goal – as many times as possible. Yes, you may use your hands, and you’re going to need them, because if the dogs get the ball away from you, they make straight for the couch (if you don’t have a couch in your store or office, you don’t belong in business in Saratoga) and start chewing on it, and there’s only one way to get the ball back: snatch it, drool still dripping from its chewy surface, right out of your favorite hound’s jaws.

Best when played with a border collie who has never, ever showed any remotely playful behavior before (seriously! this dog has been de-freakin’-prived!) and a very mixed breed yellow eyed cartoon dog, especially if the game goes on in full view of the two people in town who least approve of Saratoga’s Dogs of Business.

Perhaps I’ll organize a tournament soon.

ISN'T IT AWFUL?

"Dammit, Kate, you are my worst friend ever!"
- message on my voicemail left just minutes ago

Sometimes I think I owe pretty much everyone in my life one big fat apology for their even having met me, but then I remember that it wasn't really my fault that we each chose to be bored in the same bar, or signed up for the same course in the philosophy of language, or had tickets to the same concert, or got invited to the same wedding. Not my fault at all.

What we've done together since then, now that's probably my fault. I don't know what it is, but somehow I seem to be everybody's worst friend (though some are still naive enough to say "best" instead). I'm an excuse on two legs for being late for work, drinking too much Guiness, not completing a homework assignment, missing a date with that special someone, whatever.

And the thing is, the excuse seems to work!

I remember one famous period of time at Beaudacious Bard College - a year after I had graduated, when students of a certain computer science professor (who never did get the guts to go skinny dipping with me, though he'd promised to as my graduation present) actually got away with not doing their homework because I was there for a visit. He told them "I haven't gotten much done, either."... quite ruefully, as I recall...

But you should be glad you have me, oh you little worker ants. I admire your better traits while being baffled by them. I encourage your bad habits. I improve your tolerance for alcohol. I loosen your tie. I waste hours of your time talking about nothing. I baffle your children. I overwhelm you with web pages for a few days and then hit a dry spell, then overwhelm you some more.

And in the meantime, I don't answer my phone (the fans in this house are very loud and very necessary, and my phone is just a pitiful little jangle in the white noise), I pick up my mail maybe twice a month, and generally only make myself availalble when I feel like doing so, which is usually at a wildly inconvenient time for you, but you run off to play with me anyway.

Poor, poor darlings.

But no one is forcing you to say yes.

Hugs and kisses,

Your Worst Friend

NOT FUNNY!

I just pulled a column out of my guts – it was more work for less quantity and quality than I've ever put out for this web page – and just as I went to post it, not, of course, having even bothered to save it yet (ominous swell to the bass section), my operating system (Mac OS 9.2 for those who care) engaged in rare crashing behavior and froze me out. I did not dispair, however, because most of the time when this happens my system recovers the text I lost when I re-boot, if not all of the text at least most of it, a mini-saved version from a few minutes before disaster struck. It might not have all of the corrections and polishing, but at least it is intact and still there...

But not this time. I've tried every trick in my formidable bag to coax those golden words (you don't know how badly the column sucked, so you have to take my word for it. Haha!) back onto my screen, to no avail. Alas and alack.

So you have been spared a big long excursis expanding on Henry Miller's theme in Tropic of Cancer in which he described himself as swollenly, awkwardly pregnant with his book, a metaphor I find occasionally apt on days unlike this one, when I know right away what I'm going to write about and a whole weird section of my brain sets to work churning out the copy I will actually type up much later. At such times I'm writing while I take coffee with my friends, while I walk my dog, while I give out the Saratoga Inn's phone number for the fourteenth time that day (gritting my teeth and trying not to let that fourteenth caller know how deeply it irritates me to be used as directory assistance. Or is the suspicion I am coming to believe more and more each day, that I am the very last person left in Carbon County who both has a phone book and knows how to use it, a true one? For it's not tourists, potential or otherwise, asking for the number. No! Usually I recognize the voice on the other end of the phone, sometimes it even slips up and calls me by name and since when is it quicker to dial the chamber's phone number than 411 you cellphone toting ass?) (not that I'm bitter about this or anything) (I just wish our Local Podunk Phone Company [TM] all kinds of ill for bringing this state of affairs to pass).

It's not always like that, you know?

No.

Sometimes it's just me sprawled out on my air mattress (remember, I'm not like other people who think a whole room needs to be devoted to just being unconcious: I took what most people would use as a bedroom and crammed it full of books and notebooks and desks and file cabinets and call it the study. When I do sleep, it's on a quality air mattress in the living room, with the couch for a headboard on which my dog stretches out for lights out and from which she dangles by about 3 a.m., sharing a pillow with me, her hot, moist doggy breath beating down on my neck. Such is the price we pay for slavishly devoted companionship) staring at the weirdly patterned light fixture (it looks kind of like the UFO language Obie the Artist and I made up for the alien abduction set in our Haunted House last year. Honest. Someday I will unravel its message and be able at last to contact VALIS and unlock the knowledge that is my birthright as a living creature on earth but that the evil demiurge keeps me from seeing by distracting me with petty material concerns like the laws of physics and food and sex) (really, it does) and wondering what the hell I'm going to write about now. I've covered it all, I tell myself, and everybody is going to get bored and go away and then I'll slog out the next 60 years of my life wondering what the hell to do with myself besides try to decipher my light fixture.

Wait, that doesn't sound like too bad a life to me.

Must be the Benadryl talking. Take enough of that stuff and it might as well be codiene cough syrup (the elixir of insanity our local physician gives me to ease the burden of my astonishingly frequent attacks of bronchitis, pneumonia, pharyngitis or a pleasant mixture of all three; a friend of mine in Moscow [Russia, not Idaho] [are there drugs in Idaho, or are they still smoking potatoes?] who has a taste for smack now and then but can't always get it when he has a mind tells me if I were to suck down a half-bottle of that it would be exactly like a heroin buzz. Just what I need to know when my tonsils swell up and close off my throat and my muscles feel like Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield had a bare knuckles brawl on top of me). Combine it with the copious amounts of coffee I have to consume just to get enough of a start to go take a shower and you have the metabolic mess that is me in the summertime.

Wait, so what was I talking about again?

OK, I'd better save this....

WHERE THE MISSILE LANDS...

...Is going to be everything, thanks to my ordinance-happy colleagues in your Saratoga town government.

No, I’m not talking Minuteman, Cruise or MX missiles. I’m talking any bean, rock, pellet or squishy blob of paint that might come firing out of a “device to cast, throw, hurl or propel any missile or projectile within the corporate limits in the town of Saratoga.”

There’s one more reading on this steaming piece of ordinance-to-be (you know, ever since I became an elected official, “steaming” has become one of my most commonly used adjectives. Could that be just a coincidence? But that’s a matter to puzzle over on some other day) and I still plan to vote no on it, not because I’m not deeply concerned for your own personal health and safety and that of your windshields, windows and speed limit signs, but because everything bad that a person could do with a bow, crossbow, slingshot, pellet gun, BB gun, paint-ball gun or other device is already illegal!!. Break someone’s window? Guess what, that’s destruction of property! Hit a passerby in the head with a paintball? Some people might call that assault.

See where I’m going with this here?

But it could have been worse, because the original amendment our police chief submitted for our approval did not contain the following very crucial clarifications:

“It is unlawful...except within the confines of that person’s property, provided that the propelled object also stays within the confines of that person’s property.

He almost asked us to completely prohibit archery practice or paintball games or another very common practice (which I’ll touch on in a moment), but a few angry citizens pointed out to him how very unpopular that move would be. See? Sometimes citizen action is productive. Never think you don’t make a difference, folks!

So, since this is a redundant and unnecessary move, as banning things that have already been banned always is (what’s next, banning bananas because some little old lady might get hurt if somebody else chooses to whack her in the head with one? That’s the kind of reasoning that has gone into the drafting of this ordinance. Yes, I’m aware I’ve taken it to a ridiculous extreme, but that’s my right as an American and stuff, and I have to say something ridiculous every once in a while just to keep my non-political readers’ attention, don’t I? This is my little piece of the entertainment business, after all), I voted no on it in the second reading.

Unfortunately, everybody else voted yes, so I teetered on the brink of kenosis there.

BUT! There’s still one more reading to go, scheduled for our next regular council meeting on Tuesday, July 2 (6 p.m, Saratoga Town Hall, in case you’ve forgotten). That means there’s one more chance for the BB Militia (also known as my coffee boys) to make a show in support of maintaining their second amendment rights to keep and bear arms and use them to keep long-legged rats (known in other parts of the world as mule deer) (and white-tailed deer) (and mule/white-tailed hybrids) (but those don’t really exist, according to the Wyoming Game & Fish) (and we all know what happens to people who contradict the G&F, don’t we?) (no we don’t) (my point exactly!) out of their yards.

So here's a special message just to militia members (and you know who you are). I expect to see you all arranged in close order, armed to the teeth with your Red Ryder BB guns, your pellet guns, your pea-shooters, your slingshots, your drinking straws (just to make fun of the fact that our police chief forgot to include spitballs in the ordinance) and your paintball guns, outside town hall at precisely 5:45 p.m. on July 2. You have two weeks to work up some kind of drill. Go for it!

And while I’m on the subject of long-legged rats, who does more property damage in Saratoga: paint-ball enthusiasts or Odocoileus hemionus, hmm? I’ll give you a hint: I spent about $50 on flowers for my pretty container garden outside my front door, and I don’t think it is the toothmarks of paint-ballers on what’s left of the stems of what used to be pansies, dalhias, coleus and violas.

Now, many of the sages with whom I spend each weekday morning have long been suggesting that the solution to these odious Odocoilies is to declare a 48-hour amnesty on all dog at large problems and turn our beloved beasties loose to chase, maim, kill or at least moderately frighten those damnable deer out of town. With them gone, the argument goes, there will also be less of a barking dog problem at night as the number of teasing nocturnal visitations by these antler-bearing pests will decline dramatically.

There are several problems with this admittedly appealing idea, however. Getting everyone’s dog back where he, she or it belongs is only the most obvious, with things like body parts and corpses strewn about town being another.

BUT (there’s always a humungous “but” in my little political diatribes, isn’t there? And sometimes it’s even mine!), as usual, all this talk has given me an idea...

Since even if this dreadful ordinance passes it will still be okay to discharge pellet guns and other devices on our own property, and since paintball is lots of fun anyway, and since long-legged rats still do respond somewhat to a surprising, stinging whack on the ass... it’s time to bring about the birth of a new sport.

BIG GAME PAINTBALL!

I think it could be as simple as it is entertaining. Gather a group of interested players, choose a paintball weapon (there is an astonishing variety of these on the market, ranging from compact little pistols to vicious machine guns, and while part of me is tempted to say “anything goes”, well, you’ll see why a certain amount of standardization might be desirable in a moment), and assign a different paint color to each player (Tad the Grocer [not his real name] has already declared that he wants to be brown. Always looking for the angles, is our Tad). Then, let ‘em rip. Every month, a census of the local urban herd is taken, and the colored splotches dotting their faces, sides, asses and haunches noted. Whichever player has tagged the most deer with his own color is the winner.

Play to continue until the deer cry uncle. Which they can’t do, as they can’t talk. Woo!

See, I’m going to put this town on the map yet!

Let the PETA hate mail roll in....

OOPS

Screwed up the link. Here you go: Prairie Porn!

I DON'T USUALLY PLUG OTHER BLOGS...

...But I found this one strangely compelling. Call it the LIANT book club selection for the season. I'm expectng great things from this promising new site:

Monday, June 17, 2002

CAVEAT LECTOR...

Ohhhhh is it ever hot in here right now. So hot I should probably be writing porn instead of a blog entry, but I don't, as yet, have people harrassing me to get off my sweaty can and get going if I blow off writing porn (yet!) so I'd better stick to what the people want.

If the temperatures stay high enough, though, maybe I'll start a porn blog, too. I hear that pays better, anyway.

Meanwhile, man is it ever hot. My laptop is hot and wants to slide off my sweaty lap. I'm glad indeed that my neighbors aren't home so they can't see my black bra showing right through my peasant blouse, which is clinging to me like a bad date. My dog has the right idea; she's lying naked on her back, legs up in the air shifting herself around to catch all of the breezes from the revolving fan.

Oh wait, I wasn't going to do that, was I?

Blame it on my new favorite website, FIFAWORLDCUP.COM, packed with news and photos and quotations from my favorite sweaty soccer stars in six languages (Batistuta! Beckham! Chilavert! Inamoto! Totti! Morientes! Donovan!) (Okay, Donovan makes of me a dirty old woman, but there you go.) (But really, I respect them as athletes! I do! The rest is just an added bonus! Honest! Really!)

Or blame it on my own dear personal mama, who was the first person ever to point out to me that smut is probably where the money is, and speculated that I would probably be kind of good at it. I wasn't sure what to make of her comments at the time, but I am grateful indeed to have a family who is willing to encourage me in developing my talents. Whatever they may be.

Or blame it on my computer's Mp3 player, now blasting out a song called "Blow the Roof Off." It almost sounds like a message.

Or blame it on the weird pop-up ads that have been plaguing me lately. I just got one now from something called "femore" with a little mock-foreign accent mark over the final "e". And you know what? I'm going to click on it, just to share with you, the reader, how "intimacy is no longer a lost cause."

Ooohhhhhh! It's a cream! An intimacy enhancing cream! Just what I turn to when I need more intimacy: the American dairy industry.

When the moon hits your eye...

(Actually, I think what really disturbs me about this is that the ad for Femore popped up at Pop Cap Games, a website devoted to completely innocent, free video games to play online. I surfed there to play Bejeweled a while and got hit with this. How many poor, innocent, trusting teenagers will get suckered into... oh, wait. Listen to me!)

Or blame my coffee buddies, who let me down this morning by confining their most impassioned remarks to the subject of a cartoon called (if I remember correctly) Spongebob Squarepants. These are men in their 40s, 50s and 60s discussing a TV show that I sat through exactly once with a bunch of giggling 20 year olds who turned out to be stoned out of their minds. So pardon me if my mind wandered a bit.

Had enough yet? There are many other things and people I could blame for this blog entry, but instead I'll just shut up here and go fix myself a margarita or something.

Maybe I should take up golf.

THE GIFTS OF GOOGLE...

Many years ago when I was young and idealistic and felt, like pretty much every other young, idealistic teenager in the world, that I had been unjustly singled out by the cruel and capricious gods to live in the Most Boring, Banal Town In The World, fate stepped in and sent me off for a few weeks to the University of Wyoming for something called the Summer High School Institute, which most of those who attended it quickly dubbed "nerd camp. We called it this despite the fact that UW had already been hosting a nerd camp – debate camp – for years; we were the second wave of a newer, sexier, nerdier nerd camp, a nerd camp infested not just with briefcase trundling C-X debaters who we were all pretty sure wore three-piece suits to eat pizza in their bedrooms, but with some nerds so maladjusted, so unfit for socializing and emergence from the AV locker at their respective schools that they feared trying to make friends even with the speech team!

While I had been to the highly structured and intensely supervised Hugh O'Brien Youth Leadership Seminar (HOBY) only a few months before, this was my first real experience of being amongst kindred fools in a dynamic that still plays it out at conferences like the WAM (Wyoming Association of Municipalities) convention from which I just returned. All hail such marvelous events of any stamp, but especially for the young and the geeky, as that first experience of knowing ahead of time that you have more in common than you can even imagine with the person to whom you are trying to work up the nerve to speak – including the fact that he is also trying to work up the nerve, but is also aware that the pair of you were pretty much made by destiny to be friends for life and beyond... that first experience is invaluable.

And once that barrier is at last overcome, it's gone forever, shattered by the pair of you cracking jokes about that wildass mathematics professor (the unendingly energetic and absurdly active Ira Rosenholtz, who taught a unit on "Contemplating the Infinite" - what I would surely have referred to as "crack for space nerds" had I known in 1986 what crack is), who, in demonstrating how Xeno's paradox doesn't really work in the real, physical world we live in, began walking toward the classroom wall, demarcating each point where he had crossed half the distance to that wall, until he crashed audibly into said wall and cracked his glasses.

He was One of Us, an us we were just realizing existed. And so in no time, by twos and threes, we united in praise of Ira, of Piers Anthony, of the Dead Kennedys and the Repo Man soundtrack that was then brand new, of the music store across the street from the dorms (a true novelty to most of us for whom the music store was also the gas station and mostly featured dusty cassettes of the Oak Ridge Boys), of Vedauwoo (yes, it's okay for nerds to climb rocks!). And once the "what you like" questions became "what you are like answers, the twos and threes swelled into twelves and 20s, to include even the two or three "scholar athletes" who somehow got trapped in with the nerds and meant that in the future the solitary nerd at home in Saratoga or Pine Bluffs or Worland or Thermopolis might have a dear and bosom friend to hug on the visiting team at home basketball games.

We danced together to music that nobody else at home liked! We argued about Kurt Vonnegut with people our own age! We ran midnight raids through the halls on each other's floors (segregated by sex, alas, as a sop to parental concerns... except for my floor, half girls and half boys just like a real UW dorm [scant preparation for my own future living in dorms co-ed not by floor, not by corridor, but by room at the Ultimate Nerd Camp of Beaudacious Bard College] and separated only by an imaginary Line of Death at the elevator) so we could hang out and gossip and, in some cases, kiss (HSI fast becoming second only to speech as a source for out-of-town prom dates; many of us fell in love for real for the first time there).

And we traipsed around town on absurd adventures. Engraved forever on my own memory (and apparently on that of all the other participants) is one wild outing that started out as a mere stroll for ice cream. Baskin Robbins was closed; Taco Bell was not. We bought cokes and began to meander back.

Halfway back, one miscreant, whose name must be withheld because he is now a trial lawyer of some repute in an Eastern state, stopped us. A budding pyromaniac with advanced anarchist cookbook knowledge, he had snagged a bulging pocketload of non-dairy creamer. And some matches.

The thing to do was open a packet of powdery creamer, light a match, then sprinkle the stuff over the match, producing a tiny but intense explosion of cascading fire! We had long known about the pyrotechnic possibilities of hairspray, of WD-40, some of us even knew about gasoline and soap flakes as a homemade napalm recipe, but this was a revelation, and a feat often repeated at dances, at dinner, in the bathrooms, for the rest of the Institute.

(Interestingly enough, many of us have attempted to repeat this experiment over the years. Either the chemical composition of powdered "NDC" has changed or we were delusional, but this trick no longer works. Of course, the last time *I* tried it was in western Massachusetts several years ago, trying to entertain my fellow entomology lab assistants there, and the last time the originator of the fun tried it he, too, was on the east coast... it occurs to me now that it might be a matter of humidity. Hmm. Not terribly humid here this summer, is it?)

None of these experiences ever really left me, but they came into sharper focus this week when, out of the blue, a long lost institute buddy Googled me and found this web page. She was part of the original HSI exodus – half of us did go gladly to UW's Honors Program as was the intent of HSI, an early student retention program, while the other half rode flaming rockets of scholarship money to tony, froo-froo places like Harvard, Yale, and Duke, unheard-of and specialized places like Carleton and Mankato State, and just plain weird places like Reed and Bard. The letters flew thick and fast through our freshman years of college and came sporadically thereafter (this was still when only hardcore computer geek students who were unafraid of UNIX had internet accounts, and while that description did fit most of us, communicating with old high school friends was not considered a worthy use of this important new technology – so we still poured out our hearts to one another on dead trees). I tracked many through college, a few into graduate school or marriage (attending the wedding of one HSI-er to another along the way – they are now a happy skiing yuppie couple in Las Vegas with a ridiculously cute child) and then as the rushes and roars of our individual lives all over this country engulfed us, lost them.

It's delightful to have found a few again – no one will ever be truly unreachable or out of touch again, for as long as the internet lasts, I suspect – and amusing to see what has become of them, and what they think of what I'm doing ("Kate, what in the hell are you doing back in Saratoga?" they ask, until they get further along in reading this blog). The Googler has a bewildering multitude of jobs and responsibilities in Minnesota, the long-lost NDC burner, too, has been found, and others are sure to follow. There's the crazed U2 fan and true anarchist who still somehow disappeared into the navy after college; how hard can he be to track down? One instituter took my old job at the Saratoga Sun right here in town. Another is coaching the Rock Springs speech team. And the old bonds are all still there; the spark flies across the old connection instantly. I am anxious somehow to see them in person once again, my far flung friends. I have invited them to the Steinley Cup, one might rendezvous with me in Naperville when I go to my best friend's wedding next month, but I am greedy now to see them all again, though my actual need for them is long outgrown. I'm a sentimental slob, what can I say?

Thank the gods for Google...

CLARITY AMIDST THE FOG

At least part of my punishing course of June action is now behind me – the convention is over and I'm home at my desk in my little office/library, surrounded by my oversized bookcases, my overstuffed file cabinet, and all of the books that don't fit on or in either (this room for a normal tenant would doubtless be a bedroom, but my priorities differ; with only four in my little Unabomber cabin, why would I devote a whole room to something I never do anyway?) – but the World Cup rages on and so do I, though my eyes feel prosthetic and I'm not sure what day it is or what I've got to do tomorrow (go to the office? Sunday dinner? A council meeting?)... because sometimes the fugue state is just what is needed!

Were I enjoying total wakefulness and clarity this morning at 8 a.m. when the convention's headline speaker (whose name I'm too bushed to dig through my convention schwag to check on, but she knew Erma Bombeck personally among others; even has a nodding acquaintance with my old Greek tragedy watching seatmate John Kenneth Galbraith, so, yeah, pretty heavy duty old gal, that one) started in on her "nine elements of leadership" analysis, I doubt I'd be sitting here the way I am at 12:26 a.m. of a Sunday after my marathon, typing away when I should finally be sleeping... but no.

Through the fog of a too-intense caffeine buzz and too little sleep, came a reminder of something very, very important.

I am where I am because I chose to be. I chose to let that wacky town clerk of ours "put my name in the hat" to go on the general election ballot in 2000 (a procedure for drafting those who got write-in votes in the primary) even though I half-suspected – quite correctly! – that mine would turn out to be the only name in said hat. I chose to let my parents buy me a campaign ad. I chose to turn on all my rhetoric and speech team mojo at the League of Women Voters forum attended by... my mother's Tai Chi class and a few stray husbands.

I chose to swear the oath of office. I also chose to take the chamber job. And help coach the speech team. And take a big fat steaming commission to write a bunch of "real world financing" articles for a state teen retention magazine. I chose it all.

And yeah, a lot of people look at me and say "sucker," as happened to the groovy housewife from Guernsey who just got appointed to a council vacancy there and whose "mentor" I was for the convention (but I think I learned more from her, actually). I get lectured that I need to learn to say "no," etc.

But this week has helped me remember that I didn't just passively accept the burdens. As did so many other truly amazing people around the state, like my mentee, who is still, a grueling six months since taking her own oath of office, in wide-eyed awe at the honor she feels her council and her constituents did her in asking her to serve.

I saw that awe and the love that accompanies it – that absolutely has to accompany it – in hundreds of faces, heard it in hundreds of voices, all week long. Even as we also gathered to commiserate and bitch, to swap tales of crackpots and cranks who drive us almost as crazy as they are, to coo over each other's difficulties with the media (you'd better believe my blogging lessons were met with enthusiasm – I predict a mushrooming growth in municipal blogs in Wyoming pretty soon), that awe and love are still there and they are communicable, easily passed and renewed because essentially infinite.

And yeah, I envied Sheridan its fabulous downtown, its full storefronts, its obvious prosperity. And yeah, I envied the mayor of Gillette (my total hero in lots of ways) his full and competent staff of people who help him handle all the stuff that I have to do myself here), but also, I saw Saratoga in a clearer, more beautiful light than I have in months, my hopes for her, my plans, why I'm doing all of this, as they envied me my community support for popcorn contests, my stunningly gorgeous natural surroundings, my backyard fishing hole, my capacity for Guiness (heh). My own envy was put in perspective; all envy is, at bottom, after all, is a niggling little by-product of the unavoidable lifelong process of making choices, which commit one to one path or another while closing off others.

I could be serving in a larger or richer city – but to do so would require me to live in a much less beautiful place (apologies to Mayor Frank - but hey, that Camelplex aquatic center has to be a nice consolation for having to live in the middle of a coalbed methane nightmare), which doesn't interest me right now.

But here's the kicker – I can make a different choice later on! We all can. If suddenly my envy or whatever other ugly little "poor me" demons start getting the better of me, I can chuck it all and move to Chicago or Athens if I want. We all can. Sure, there are sacrifices involved in doing something so drastic. I doubt I could take my dog to Greece, for instance, and I'd have to drastically reduce the size of my library (at least until I got to Greece and started accumulating Greek books; I know myself). But the options are still there, the choices. And no one is ever really holding a gun to our heads. Mortgages, cars, habits – these look like guns sometimes, but they're not. They're not!

And that, perhaps, is the most valuable thing I've taken away from this crazy weekend. The pointers on how to improve water account tracking, the chance to keep our association from wasting its time encouraging stupid legislation that isn't going to go anywhere anyway, the networking, that's all good stuff and worth the time right there, but what really matters right now, is that I chose all this. And I can un-choose it if I want.

But, right now, I'm pretty happy with the choices I've made.

I hope you are happy with yours, too.

I'm showing blogger to a bunch of local elected officials so they, too, can follow Lydia Lunch's advice - DON'T HATE THE MEDIA, BECOME THE MEDIA!

OOPS!

We blessed the WRONG CAR this morning! Fortunately, Uncle Mac has been closely monitoring the situation and clued in on a later patrol. Squeaky has nothing whatsoever to do with cowboy hats, and one is prominently placed in the back seat of the car we originally thought hers (try to identify small green cars with city plates at a city council convention. Just try. For that matter, there are TWO giant green Tahoes with city plates parked at our hotel. I have yet to try to unlock the correct one on the first try - but at least I haven't triggered any alarm systems yet).

She was LATE this morning, see (and we were early - World Cup early rising on my part, habitual dawn worship on Uncle Mac's) so we could not have blessed her in any case.

But the situation is being remedied forthwith.

I'm glad I managed not to giggle at her when I saw her a few minutes ago (resplendent in a lilac-colored suit and matching shoes! I think we're overpaying her).

Now, back to finish learning about how to do a water audit. Such is the life...

SHARING THE LOVE

So last night had us conventioneers dining and drinking at the fabulous, historic Sheridan Inn, a full service restaurant/events complex complete with a ferocious parking problem. Enter the Saratoga contingent, trundling around downtown Sheridan, Wyo in an enormous Chevy Tahoe. We park where we can, we park where we can.

And that is how we earned a little love letter from Sheridan's finest! Yes! Not a parking ticket, but a sternly worded warning, addressed to our one and only hypersonic town clerk, Squeaky (not her real name), whose name of course appears on the Tahoe's registration...at least I have to assume this is how it came to be; the notion that anyone could mistake my fellow harrumphing councilman Uncle Mac (not his real name), a seven foot tall ex sergeant-major with a booming, gravelly voice that sounds like god's own master-at-arms, for Squeaky (also tall but of a more delicate frame, titian hair and a taste in clothing and couture that makes her look like she's perpetually preparing for an Easter parade) is just too absurd to contemplate.

What could we do in such a situation? We saved our parking ticket and delivered it to its intended recipient. There's a 3x6" time bomb planted on the windshield of Squeaky's car. She is, of course, parked perfectly legally in the middle of the Sheridan High School lot, so I'm sure that her outrage will overcome her basic sense of shame and I'll hear about it over lunch.

Either that or I'll hear the refrain with which she frequently greets both my father and myself: "Damn you, Sherrod!"

Stay tuned...

DIARY OF A MAFIOSA

Woo hoo! Now I know how the Crips and the Bloods feel! There's nothing like walking into a room at the head of a posse to make a girl feel tough and scary. I may start wearing a doo-rag!

Yup, I'm back with the Carbon County Mafia, the combined tequila-drinking, jail-building, antelope-shooting, river-floating might of the local elected officials of Carbon County's ten municipalities. No other Wyoming county has near so many towns, so no other Wyoming county has near so many delegates here at the annual convention of the Wyoming Association of Municipalities. We're a faction, a bloc, a gang! It's plumb intoxicating!

Speaking of intoxication, well, that's what the mafia does best. We take over bars, mostly - last night's victim was the Mint Bar, here in Sheridan, a wonder of warm cedar driftwood, panels of real brands from real Wyoming ranches (I found two from Saratoga just in the nook where we sat - one for the Mowrys and another I couldn't read) and an ample supply of Jackson-brewed Zonker Stout (for some reason, the Mint has concluded that Guiness is a "winter" brew and has a policy of replacing it in the summertime with an Alaska Amber, drinkable but certainly no substitute), followed by some cheesy kid bar that, in its defense, did have dance music (nobody dances like party-starved municipal clerks: it's quite a sight), but in its debit column was infested with...

KARAOKE

Prompting Radical Ron (not his real name), Rawlins' economic development officer, and I to engage in a favorite pastime: haiku wars. Below is the finest flowering of this unusual art form, a joint effort of ours that evolved over the course of about 500 agonizing hours sucking down Amber Bock (best they had, alas) and trying not to listen. But enough on that subject.

Karaoke hell.
Tone-deaf singers keep it up.
Take away the book.

Ah, conventioneering.

And what was the big topic of contention at this morning's public safety policy committee meeting? Why, liquor licenses, of course!

Justice, like government officials in Carbon County, can be quite poetic.

More later (aren't you glad there's full-bore internet access available at convention headquarters?)...

GRATUITOUS SPEED POST AHEAD!

Purely to soothe the terror and stave off the ire of those of you who have been checking this site and wondering when the hell I'm going to write something new, I'm writing something new, though I am soon to board the Town Tahoe for a six-hour drive with a fellow harrumphing council member to go attend the annual convention of the Wyoming Association of Municipalities. Never say I don't do what I can to keep you happy. It's all for you. Feel the love.

I have missed a Spanish goal in the last round of their pool play. They are ahead of South Africa 3-1. Kind of meaningless, though, since Spain has already advanced to the elimination round (so for once I slept - are you proud?). But still, I sacrificed seeing this goal, which excited Ty Keogh very much, because I care about YOU. Yes, you, dear reader. I'm thinking of you right now. I'm putting you ahead of my quadriannual (no, I don't know if that's the actual word and I'm on the tightest deadline of my life here, so no time to look it up, so pretend it is one, okay?) soccer orgy. I hope you appreciate how special that is.

While I'm babbling, lately I've been wondering what kind of readership I still have. I know the persistent readers, commenters, hecklers (most common heckling text: "I'm serious! You need to get a life!" -- advice I take with a grain of salt since it comes from a man who earned the designation of Sewer King. But I digress. It's what I do when I'm not busy having a life). But what about the rest of you. Who are you? Where do you live? Grey Poupon or French's? Less Filling or Tastes Great? Legs or breasts?

Seriously. I'm curious. I know there's people reading me in Florida, Maryland, Minnesota, Illinois and Tokyo... anywhere else? People I'm not personally acquainted with?

Wow, now that I've posed the questions, I'm bound to lose sleep over it until I have some idea of the answers. And there's still two weeks of World Cup Wackiness to go. That's a lot of sleep I'm not going to have. Which will affect the quality of the blog. So do your part for making LIANT the wonder of the Wyoming Wide Web and drop me a line. There's a little thingie on the left hand side of this page where you can e-mail me (I'd put in a mailto link, but I'm just discombubulated enough not to be sure of the syntax, and I don't have my HTML guide handy).

So do it already.

OK, off to Sheridan. I'll bring you back something nice. Kisses and hugs!

Don't drink all the beer while I'm gone.

- The author

BECOMING NOCTURNAL

I have a whole different set of priorities this month.

I offer this little tidbit not as an excuse for not having posted to this page in five months (dog time), as I have no exuse for THAT other than laziness, ennui and a bird festival to run (about which more anon, of course), but as an excuse for not going to coffee much this month - and as long time readers know, coffee is where I get most of my best column material.

So what is my priority that is keeping me out of the public eye, local gossip and the continuing saga of popcorn wars?

The FIFA WORLD CUP, baby!

It goes like this: think of how much you love the NzBA, hockey, professional (American) football, the Eukanuba dog show circuit, NASCAR, the PGA, whatever silly sporting event pins you in your recliner with a cold one by your side shouting things like “pass, you dumbass” and “my grandmother drives faster than that!” at the top of your lungs at a very expensive piece of furniture. Now think of what a drag it would be if you only got to see it once every four years.

Hence, my devotion to catching as much of the World Cup as I can, a devotion so intense that I actively encouraged my parents to go on a long road trip so I can borrow their cable-TV equipped house (well, it WOULD be silly for me and annoying for the cable guy for me to hook up to cable for just this one month, wouldn’t it?), and I have sat up VERY late almost every night watching a bunch of foreigners in shorts (I missed the USA vs. Portugal game because I couldn’t drag my sorry butt out of bed at 3 a.m. - thus learning my lesson that it’s easier for me to STAY up than GET up. I won’t commit that error again) kick a ball around an enormous field while commentators with nearly impenetrable accents slowly catch me up to speed on what these players, most of whom I haven’t seen in action since 1998, have been up to lately.

I’ve only seen a few teams in action so far, but I’m already wishing I could reassess my picks for the Secular Johnson Pick’em league (I obviously way underrated Senegal, who last night executed as beautiful a play as I’ve ever seen, a precisely timed series of exquisitely perfect passes all the way from their goal to Denmark’s and ending in a very neat equalizer goal that left even Seamus Mallin kind of tongue-tied).

And so far I’m still functional in the daytime. I’ve been missing coffee but not missing work, and there’s all this Diet Coke leftover from several chamber events at which people cleaned out the pop coolers, denuding them of everything but Diet Coke, so there’s plenty, it’s all here in my office and it’s all now crammed into the fridge that shares space with Molly the Collie under my desk...

I shall probably drive my Wyoming Association of Municipalities colleagues batty next week, scheduling our social time around games, though I suspect that at least one of my treasured drinking buddies, the municipal judge at Opal, might be just as crazy as I am (we both own Newcastle United replica jerseys, to give you an idea). I’ll either drag them from bar to bar in Sheridan, Wyo (of course we’re starting at the Mint, where they know how to pour a proper pint of Guiness, according to my advance scouts) in search of one that will let me tune in, or I’ll be cutting us off at midnight so I can settle into my motel room for ESPN’s World Cup 2Night and the first game of the evening.

Yup, a whole different set of priorities in June...

ANY EXCUSE...

Lo venire, lo brindare, lo riuscare
- My Saratoga Wine School 2002 diploma

(Rough translation: I came, I drank, I graduated - and never you mind the infinitives)

Just because living in Saratoga isn't enough fun yet, the wife of our esteemed mayor, who along with said mayor is something of a wine connoisseur (French for snob) (not really in strictly lexigraphical linguistic terms, but true in spirit, no?), came up with a capital new idea.

Although we live in what is arguably the dining capital of Wyoming, although we already have something of a world class liquor store (really! If they don't have it, they'll order it for you, just like our book store! Which is also a quilt store! But I digress! As usual!), although we are already people who are devoted to squeezing the last possible fragment of fun that life has to offer, Mrs. Mayor decided what we really needed was a Wine School.

Wine School in Saratoga terms meaning three successive wine "tastings" on concurrent Monday nights at the already ridiculously sybaritic Hotel Wolf, those tastings accompanied by huge hunks of "Italian Candy" (gorgonzola cheese as it's known by the family who owns and operates the wolf) aka "gagonzola" (as it is known to the oldest daughter thereof, who notwithstanding can make a mean flank steak gyro without even thinking about it) and other treats.

For a small fee, residents of our fair and silly burg got to hear lectures from area representatives of national wineries like Gallo (who through their Redwood Creek label have actually made a merlot that didn't make me gag - of course it's cut very liberally with that true prince of grapes, the SHIRAZ!!!!) as well as local ones like the Terry Ranch (who starting late this summer will feature a red and a white created with Canadian hybrid grape strains grown on the south sides of hills all over Wyoming - yes, Wyoming - that show great promise judging from the wines the crew there has made from grapes already tainted by that Colorado soil...). It was meant to introduce "course" takers to things like the aroma wheel, the difference between varieties of grape, the importance of terroir, etc.

But, this being Saratoga, anyone who cares about that sort of thing already knows, and everybody else just likes whatever fermented grape juice does the job of loosening the tongue, releasing the inhibitions, etc. So what it really was, was an elegant and VERY enjoyable excuse for getting together with people who were already our friends and guzzling a lot of wine and eating a lot of Italian Candy and other appetizers. A typical exchange therein went something like this:

PAID WINE EXPERT: You might note hints of cherry and vanilla in this remarkable blend of Shiraz and other grapes from Australia.

ME: I don't taste any of that stuff, but I'll sure as hell drink it!

LOCAL CONTRACTOR FRIEND OF MINE: Me neither, Kate! Cheers!

Brief silence as my contractor friend and I drain our glasses, ignoring completely the wine-tasting protocol of "chewing" the wine and then delicately spitting it out into the buckets provided. Hey, at least we stuck our considerable schnozzes into the glasses before guzzling; we have learned a thing or two about "nose" over the years.

RECENT RELOCATOR TO THE VALLEY: I don't know about cherry or vanilla, but this smells a lot like banana!

MAYOR AND ME: Oh so Thomas Pynchon o yes!

Etc.

Yes, this wine school can be called a success, even though more than half of us plotted to fail the course deliberately so we could be sentenced to summer school and considerably more of us than that gleefully accepted after-school "detention" and still more of us talked about general remedial courses...

Then tonight, the coup de grace. Just to make you all jealous, dear readers, here is the menu, prepared, I might add, as expertly as it might have been done in Tuscany or anywhere:

ANTIPASTO - Asiago cheese stuffed olive, garlic infused olive oil and french bread (all you need for buna cauda except for no anchovies!), with Sonoma Cut'rer Chardonnay (very nice, not as dry as most chardonnays but not so sweet you go into a diabetic coma either).

ENSALADA: (Did I mention the management of the Hotel Wolf has a bit of an Italian bias? Funny for people who specialize in prime rib, no?): Romaine with pears and gorgonzola salad dressing (heavy on the wondrous raw garlic), with Silverado Sauvingnon Blanc.

MAIN COURSE: Baked tenderloin (that's beef for you city folk) with Madeira wine sauce, garlic mashed potatoes, steamed broccoli, with Wild Horse Pinot Noir (!) and Clos Du Val Cabernet Saugvignon (good, but I'm still a working girl, so I'll stick to Liberty School when I want a cab, and Black Opal Shiraz, which I learned I can save a lot of money by buying by the case, when I just want a good, affordable red).

DESSERT: Grapes and assorted cheese (those cheeses being a nice aged gruyere, my favorite since I was a tot and bogarted the gruyere from our Swiss Colony order each Christmas) and Blockheadia Ringnosii Zinfandel and Tosti Asti.

Yes, it's a difficult, deprived and horrid existence here in Saratoga, Wyo, but we do endure, we do endure.

And none of us can wait for our Wine School 2002 class reunion!

(Meanwhile, Obie and me and a few others are planning on our own learning disabled make-up sessions of Wine School to make sure we deserve our diplomas!)

FOR WHOM THE BELL TOLLS...

So, there I was sitting peacefully at coffee yesterday morning, discussing the affairs of the day with my friends, when suddenly we all heard the noon whistle a little early (for my out-of-town readers: this is an old mill town, and the big loud fire alarm still goes off every day at noon to tell us all we may go to lunch. Usually it goes off when we're already at lunch, but that's another story).

Amidst speculations about what would happen if there was a fire at noon, would anyone show up, etc., one of my snarkier friends leaned over and said "Ah, don't worry; it's just Kate's house burning down!"

Ha. Ha. Ha-ha, I believe I said to him.

Cut to about an hour later, I return to my office, and there sitting patiently on the sofa, are my own dear personal mom and dad, mom looking chagrined, my dad bearing a shit-eating grin.

"So, Kate, are you ready to move again?" my father asks.

"This isn't very funny, honey," my mom whispers, slightly swatting him.

"...?" says I.

"Did you hear the fire sirens this morning?"

Swat.

"Well, yes! What was it?"

"That was for your house."

Cut to me sitting heavily on the floor, all color drained from my cheeks, all breath escaped from my body. Everything begins happening in slow motion, blurred, soundless. I'm thinking of my 100+ year old poetry books, all of my journals, drafts for novels...library books already overdue...

Dimly, from 1000 feet underwater, I hear my mother saying something to the effect of "Ha, ha ha, how does it feel?"

My father lets me off the hook: "I ran over your gas meter is all. It's all fixed and your pilot lights are lit and everything."

Apparently they had been to my little house on the river to set up the fenceposts for a dog pen, as this time tomorrow I shall have a four-legged duck herder for a roommate. Since said duck herder is a grown border collie, my father decided I need an extra tall fence, and so the posts are correspondingly lofty - he had to stand up in the back of his pickup to pound them in.

And in moving the truck to put up the last fencepost, he nudged the gas meter a bit.

Apparently every single member of the Saratoga Volunteer Fire Department, of which my dad is a former president among other things, showed up for the call. I imagine it's going to be a while before he lives this down, poor man.

But of course, my family is going to be ragging on me for years for falling for the old "for whom the bell tolls" gag, too.

As I say so often in these and other pages, no day is a dull day.

SOMETIMES, THIS STUFF BUGS ME...

"And now, a question of etiquitte: As I pass, do I give you the ass or the crotch?"
- Tyler Durden

I just jumped onto AOL's Instant Messenger a moment ago to see if my sister might be on because, well, she and I are both "a bubble off" and are more likely to be home and quiet on a Friday night than pretty much anyone (my nights to howl being Tuesdays and Thursdays and hers being... much more random, actually).

And she wasn't there but a bunch of my brothers in secularity were. I wasn't in the mood to further discuss the recent rash of pipe bombs in the midwest or the Will Code For Food guy or PUTTING IN BEN WALLACE, so I jumped off very quickly.

But I saw that they were online, so conversely, through the magic of buddy lists, they would have seen that I was on, too.

Should I have hailed them, acknowledged seeing them even though I didn't want to get into a conversation? Was it rude of me to zip in and zip out?

Were this "real" life and I saw them on the street, surely I would at least wave (indeed, in my real life, everyone waves, even to strangers, and woe betide she who does not wave back, because sure 'nuff, the next time she is sitting vulnerable on a bar stool of a tired Tuesday night because the mayor is on a bathroom break and the minister of fun is hitting on a tourist, that's when the person to whom she didn't wave will corner her, accusing her of self-involvement, snobbery, or worse!).

But what's the AIM equivalent of waving?

Does anyone else think about these sorts of things?

OH WAS IT WORTH IT!

While most of you, my gentle readers, were watching TV or pounding away at theses or sitting through meetings or working late or doing whatever it is you poor creatures do when you're not treating yourselves to my golden prose last night, guess what I was doing (after my requisite three or so hours finishing things up at the old apartment, I mean)?

*I* went fishing in my own backyard!

No, I didn't catch anything (as my own dear personal dad likes to say, more often than not, "The fishing was good but the catching was lousy"); the river where it runs past my house does not present an ideal fishing hole as such, but that's not the point.

The point was that it was possible. I had access. I was a mere 15-20 feet from my very own front door, barefoot, in my kick-around-the-house clothes, a mandarin and soda at my side (and I didn't have to hump out a cooler to have ice and refill material) and I had a line in the water! And got to watch a pair of ospreys farting around overhead (many thanks to Obie the Artist [not his real name], without whose company and guidance I would still not know an osprey by sight. To say nothing of his assistance in humping my furniture over to the new place, for which his reward is K8E's own Sicilian pizza this weekend!). And saw a great sunset. And when the sun went down, stars (my old neighborhood had too many trees to permit a view of more than a slice of sky).

Now, I'm not gloating (much), but damn, I'm pretty satisfied.

Except for one little thing.

By rights, I should also have been able to write this little blog entry from said riverfront lawn, and post it. But I could not.

My Local Podunk Phone Company (tm) has not yet hooked up my land line, you see. So I had to compose this article from memory more or less (and actually, you should probably be glad, gentle readers, because I'm pretty sure the original was a lot more smug) from the confines of my office and upload it from my work desk tonight after two very exhausting meetings. Boo!

On the other hand, however, my phone didn't ring once while I was fishing. From my back yard. Ha.

WHERE ELSE BUT HERE...?

So, I stopped by the offices of my Local Podunk Phone Company (tm) recently to ask them to change over my land line service to my new place, which they will cheerfully do for a totally unjustifiable fee that's not cripplingly high but is still ridiculous and annoying enough to make me want to spend that amount on some really good vodka until I'm nice and liquored up and then call the president of my Local Podunk Phone Company (tm) at his home and tell him to shove that land line up his...

But that's not what I meant to write about in this little note, because this actually relates to something kind of cute, kind of nice, kind of charming – a real "only in Saratoga" thing.

Because the gal who broke the news of the fee to me has known me my entire life, and as she broke the news to me, she stopped me from storming out of her office with a gentle "Oh by the way, Kate, I've been meaning to give you something I found a while ago. It's out in my glove box."

Lo and behold, the phone lady had a photo she'd taken of me when I was a baby. It's sitting now on my desk in my office until such time as I can bring it to my new home without worrying about its loss. In it, I sit with just the first traces of hair on my head, plopped down on a baby blanket with my teething ring and a shot glass (there are apparently no extant photos of me before age three in which I do not have some accoutrement of alcohol close at hand, as my parents' famous pic of me with a bottle of Cracklin' Rosie attests). What a happy looking little baby that is! No clue about the whirlwind of meetings, popcorn pop-offs, rude telemarketers, deadlines, car troubles, mysterious boxes of kitchen items, or really obnoxious service charges to change over her phone service in her future.

Bliss indeed, courtesy of my favorite employee at my LPPC(tm).

A MOVING EXPERIENCE

“I hear you’re not going to be a troll any longer!”

Oh, it’s a true friend indeed who can get away with opening a conversation this way, but in this case this smart aleck remark is remarkably accurate: I am emerging like we wish Osama would from the cave I have made my home lo these many years, and I can already feel the attendant improvements in my disposition.

It’s something of a drawn-out process, moving from a tiny basement apartment to (amusingly enough) a somewhat tinier house across the river, and it’s not one I’m enjoying one bit as I sort through years and years of stuff and debris trying to pare down the volume to one that will comfortably fit into my new home and still leave room for me and my habit of pacing furiously when writer’s block threatens to overcome me.

Alas, it’s not just my stuff, either, that I’m sorting through. I long ago became some kind of weird focal point for the foisting off of other people’s possessions. It started off with my grandmother’s kitchenwares when she closed up her house and moved to a retirement home and went on from there. Someone would offer me a box full of goodies and at first glance it would all look so devastatingly useful that I would say “Of course I’ll take that!” Only later would I find there were only three or four actually useful items cunningly distributed on the box’s top layer.

Of course, a normal person would have kept the useful items and discreetly pitched the rest, but though I am now unmistakenly oozing into my fourth decade I still haven’t really gotten the hang of this “throwing stuff away” business. I can throw away papers, pens that run out of ink, magazines I’m done reading (unless they contain an article or two I’ve found really good – I’m still too disorganized to maintain a clipping file), stuff like that, but what about a pretty good saucepan that’s just not in as good a condition as the three others I have? There is (thank god) a used clothing store here in town whereat I can get rid of the fourteen pairs of sweatpants that have somehow materialized in my utility room over the three years I’ve lived in my cave (and I don’t even wear sweatpants! Ever! Give me shorts or give me death! Remember, I even wear shorts in December!), but what about a store for used computer components (I have a Dell chassis, a 486 microproccessor, a great PC motherboard and a perfectly good monitor... gathering dust in my linen closet ever since I bought my tangerine iBook. Any takers? Anyone?).

But alongside the anguish there is also awe and awareness. Like so many others of my generation, I have moved more times than I can count on two hands (so you think I’d have gotten rid of some stuff along the way, but no, no. Always before there has been haste and hurry, and usually a moving van with more space than was strictly necessary; much easier to toss it all in and sort it all out when I’m at the new place. The sorting just never came!) and so I am quite familiar with the phenomenon of objects lost many moves past turning up again during the packing or unpacking process.

Interestingly enough, the find thus far consists chiefly of photos and related relics from my very first non-dormitory abode, a seriously funky farmhouse in Orono, Maine I shared with several other entomology students – and in many ways just a bigger, stranger version of the house into which I am moving now. Most arresting and, in a way, poignant are some of the photos of my friends and roommates at the time, international students I will probably never see again (or at least not all in one room, crammed into one car, gazing sentimentally at each other over plates of cheap lobster in restaurants, dancing and drinking powerful Brazilian cocktails at three-day parties) but were the first ones who got me watching soccer seriously, friends whose wives I took on whirlwind shopping tours as we made the local IGA our English language lab... I have to strain now to remember everyone’s name in the photos but I still can. I have no idea where in the world they all are now, not even the crazy German-Spaniard I was in love with at the time, and it’s sad to realize that, but it’s fun to remember them.

Mentally I make plans to make some kind of big photo collage now that soon I will dwell in a place where it’s okay to put things on the walls and there is enough light to see them. Not only enough light to see photographs, but enough light to keep plants alive. I’ll save on electricity because I’ll be able to read by daylight again. I’ll have a view out my windows.

And speaking of views: This little cottage, this crazy cabin (no Unabomber jokes, thank you), this funky little love shack, has a mighty fine one because IT’S RIGHT ON THE RIVER! Yes! I have lovely vistas out two windows where I can watch the ducks, both in the river and IN MY BACKYARD. I might even be able to fish from my backyard, though I don’t know how the catching will be. I’ll have my own lawn (of sorts) on which to sit as I enjoy it all.

Yes, there’s lots to look forward to once I get the old place cleaned out.

Until that happens, though, if you see me walking frazzled down the street, don’t panic. There is neither a town nor a chamber crisis a-brewing. I’m just wondering what to do with that extra coffeemaker.

SOMEBODY PINCH ME!

All signs point to my actually getting a chance to use my degree this week! Saratoga High School's junior class voted in overwhelming numbers earlier this school year to use a Chinese theme for its prom decorations, and one of their sponsors remembered that I spent four sweaty years of my life learning the Beijing dialect and traditional character system of that very language!

So in between making final plans for Goofy Golf (about which more in another blog entry; it's late tonight and I've been through a meeting marathon today) and finishing the Chamber's tax return and helping the Minister of Fun prepare his requests for allocations from Saratoga's municipal budget (first budget workshop is 4 p.m. Tuesday, April 30 at Town Hall! I know you'll all want to be there!), I get to go paint Chinese graffitti on a whole bunch of stuff at the high school gym!

And here I thought I'd chosen a pointless course of study at Beaudacious Bard College. I'm sure Lao Guan would be proud.