empty houses

It's just a line from your old town

where we're still drinking to the times

when you were around

Last night, I told a friend that we were at what was both the best and the worst party I've been to in a while. The two of us were on the front porch swing, as friends inside listened to music, talked, and drank to our friends who were leaving the state in the morning.

One of my friends got an awesome tenure-track job in Washington state, so both of them decided to hold an empty house party last night before getting up this morning for their cross-country trek to their new home, to their new lives. Naturally, I am truly happy for them both. You gotta love new adventures, and you particularly have to love when someone's career path/dream pans out...because that is increasingly rare nowadays. So a large part of me is thrilled that life was going in a good direction for them.

I also realize how greatly enriched my life has been by knowing both of them. Without these two, I wouldn't have played in a band, got to know several other people, had so many fun nights listening to music together, talking at the bar, hanging out on our back porch, discussing new (to me) ideas, generally and genuinely connecting with two wonderful people.

So there is a lot of good here. Yet they're still leaving my life. That street, that house, they will now just be another addition to the increasingly long list of places where friends of mine used to live.

I've mentioned before that my father was in the military. Even though he made great efforts to try and give us as close to a normal life as he could, there was still a lot out of his control. He might keep us at one base for five years, but our friends would still regularly move out. Starting school each year was starting over. Who would be here this time? That person who you used to talk to during recess? They were now in Guam, or on the west coast, or somewhere else...it didn't really matter where, because the only real important thing was that they were far from where you lived.

When my Dad retired, we moved to his hometown of Jacksonville. The first immediate difference I noticed (apart from the hellish heat and humidity) was that when I went to school that first day, there weren't a bunch of people who were looking for new friends because their best friend's dad just got transferred to the other side of the world. No, everybody had a full array of friends, because they had known the same people all their lives. That, it seemed, was the big difference between being the kid of a military man and being the child of a civilian.

I lived in Florida for fourteen years, and I kinda got used to knowing the same people for years on end. When I entered my doctoral program, though, it flung me back into the realm of short-term friends. Although the people I have met up here are the best friends I've ever had, I still have to brace myself for their eventual departure.

Each year, the list of places where friends used to live grows, and simple strolls around town become an exercise in mental three dimensional archeology. I walk down this street, where my friend is now in Minnesota. This house is one a few people I know shared; now they are in Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and Maryland respectively. I turn down another street. My friend from Romania used to live in this apartment complex. I walk past another house, and I have no idea if the dear friend who used to live here is permanently a resident of Michigan or of Norway. I head home and pass the complex where my friend used to live who died unexpectedly this past year.

It's wearying.

I had these thoughts last night, as my soon-to-be-departing friends were holding what was admittedly a righteous party...good music, good friends, good food, good drink, good conversation...yet it was already a prelude to an empty place where yet more departed friends used to live.

living in a Mad Max world

Gatherings of friends bring joy, yes, but they also bring insecurities, fears, tears, doubts, self-loathing...but at least these are things we're able to share rather than being forced to carry alone.

Flash back to those wonderfully awkward days of junior high school. It was still a few years before people started peppering me with the obligatory "what are you going to do when you graduate?"...questions that would come years later, but that was alright by me. I was young, but in my youthful arrogance, I had began to suspect even at that age that long term work-till-you-die plans would probably never come with any conviction. But while I lacked a real career path, I did already have an option which was more a calling, more an identity than a career, and even that contained a significant element of delusion and fantasy.

I wanted to be a musician.

I had already worked through a bout of being a violinist. The story is actually kind of amusing. My 5th grade teacher told my parents that I was probably mentally challenged (nice lady), and I should probably be tested. So I was shuffled to the guidance counselor's office for an IQ test. When the results came in, my teacher was quite upset to find out that I was not in fact mentally retarded. While I never got to see my scores, I do know that for my next year of school, I was enrolled in an academically gifted program.

The counselor told my parents that I needed more mental stimulation that school (in particular, my 5th grade teacher's craptastic class) could provide...hence the academically gifted program. He also recommended that I take up a musical instrument, and since my dad had a violin from the days he was forced to take up an instrument, the decision was made for me.

Several years on the instrument made me realize I wasn't a bad violin player. I had good technical skills, and I was particularly adept at sight-reading. I even won a superior ranking in some music competition. However, I had absolutely no feel for the music. While I was good at it, I felt no passion. The most heart-wrenching symphonies were merely challenges. I was only someone who played violin, never a violinist. The instrument never became part of who I was.

After a family move to Florida, my folks never found me another violin teacher, and the instrument kind of remained in the closet. However, much to my parent's chagrin, I started to really listen to hard rock and roll and heavy metal, and instead of violin, I now wanted to be a guitarist. For reasons I couldn't fathom at the time, my folks refused to buy me an instrument...so instead I saved up my lunch money for a Chicago-brand Les Paul copy. Of course, I sucked on it for a long period of time, but I loved it.

My folks were less than supportive of my new music obsession. While my Dad would occasionally pick me up a pack of strings, they refused to buy me anything else. When I saved up more lunch money and holiday gift money and wanted a real guitar, my folks made me sell my first guitar (I was told I did not need two). Whenever I left to play with friends, I would be reminded "this is only a hobby. You can't make a living at this." Eventually, I started working so I could buy more music stuff, but even then, I had to be careful. When I bought my honest-to-goodness real vintage Gibson Les Paul, I had to hide it from my mom for a while and lie about how much money I spent. But I didn't care...because I was a guitar player. The music was within me, a part of me. It was who I was.

There came a time where I realized that although I needed a job to buy musical equipment, that work kept me from actually playing. If I wanted the means to become a musician, I had to work at a job that kept me from playing music...and thus prevented me from becoming a musician.

There were many trials and tribulations, many stories of music, failed bands, and stoners passing around unsalted pretzels, but there is a larger point here beyond my doomed teenage music career. Suffice to say, after many failures on my part, I decided that being a musician probably wasn't, for various reasons, in my cards. I went back to school, got a couple of degrees, and eventually moved away to doctoral school.

Moving away from everyone I knew, from everything familiar, was the most significant thing I had ever done. I developed friends, and they became colleagues. We could talk about our lives, our interests, yes, but we could also talk about ideas, theories, concepts, important stuff. We could talk about the best way to reach our students. We could discuss the best ways to refine and present our ideas. We became academics in every sense of the word, because the learning, the thinking, the process of discovery began to pervade everything we did. "Academic," for us, was not our career...it became our identity.

And yet...

One day in particular of Ohio year one, I was sitting in my apartment, where, after hours fighting with some heavy critical theorist or something, I needed to clear my head. I turned on my 19" television to Star Trek: The Next Generation or something, picked up my acoustic, and began to run through some chords. Before long, I was working my way through some Son Volt, some Stones, some Neil Young.

I wasn't thinking about much except for maybe how my voice had, a few years after quitting smoking, become viable as an instrument. I could sing and play, and I actually sounded passable. This was also after I abandoned guitar picks for my acoustic, so I was able to provide much better rhythm and dynamics on the acoustic than ever before.

I finished the song I was playing, but before I could launch into anything else, there was a knock on my door. When I opened it, there was a young girl in the hallway--she must've been around twelve. She said "I just wanted to tell you I think you're good." She smiled at me, turned, and left my hallway. I think about this an awful lot. Years after giving up being a guitar player, I realized, I became a much better player than when I thought I was a guitarist, even if I now thought of myself as an academic.

Nowadays, I'm still playing guitar. I have several great instruments. I have a moderate DIY effects pedal board. Hell, I'm in a band, and we're in discussions for gigs. And this all happened after I gave up hope being a guitar player.

It's very easy to get caught up in expectations...your friends, your families, your superiors. It's even easier to get caught up in your own expectations...of success, of justice, of right and wrong, of "what we deserve." Expectations, however, are all poisonous and will do you in if you pay them heed. A promise of a big reward can in fact be a lie. Any hope of cosmic justice, if it's your main motivating factor, has the opportunity to do you in. The true test of character is how you operate after giving up all hope. If everything is crashing down, will you still fight?

Personally, I have a habit of mentally writing things off as hopeless just because all evidence tells me so. Take my status as an academic, for instance. Will I ever get to be a tenure-track faculty? It doesn't matter how hard I work, how much stuff I produce, how many classes I teach. Things are so bad in the academic job market these days, and my friends are so much better at this and more deserving than am I, that I just know I can't compete, that I will probably always be where I am. It would be illogical to think otherwise, and the sooner I just accept this (says the little voice in my head), the better off I will be.

I know I'm not the only one. There's always the danger that, when you ask academics how they are doing, they might in fact tell you (and most of my friends are academics). Me and my friends, we are in a career that is at its historical low point. The signs of the academic collapse have been chronicled so often, I certainly don't need to recount them here. And you can't go to a bar, go to a party, run into someone on the street without hearing it in someone's voice.

How do we handle it? How do you go on when, instead of having your back against the wall, you have that wall pulled down on top of you? How do you handle knowing that there is no order, no justice, no logic? That things very well might not work out after all? That your current effort do go beyond the call of duty, of reason, of logic probably will not pay off? When there is no hope left, when the world has, for all intensive purposes, ended...what do you do then? How do you survive when survival no longer makes sense? Should you even bother trying to fight? As some struggling musicians I like say, "would you keep on going if you couldn't make it through?"

I hope so. Personally, I don't know if I will ever be a successful academic, but then I have to remind myself: I became a much better guitar player after I gave up being a musician.

Hope is overrated. Work is much more important.

ain't no cure...

Each year in Bowling Green ends pretty much the same way. It gets moderately warm, with bouts of awful humidity. A large mass of students leave, and we briefly reclaim the town. There are cookouts, cigars on the back porch, walks through town, games of croquet or bocce...you know, the good stuff.

Then everything starts changing. Some people, realizing they have no definite plans for the next year, start to panic. Some people try to cram in as much work as possible since teaching will leave them no time to do what they love. Some people regress under deadlines, and you don't see them for stretches of time. And then, there's the worst part of the summer: people leave.

This is the thing I've never really gotten used to, even though I've been experiencing it all my life. As an Air Force brat, I regularly had to make new friends every year as families dispersed throughout the globe. When my father retired and we moved to Florida, I marveled at how some of my new friends had known each other for years, since they were little kids. For a while, there was stability...but then I moved up to Ohio, and I had to get used to grad school scattering us to the wind each year.

I've hauled more couches up more stairs than I care to remember. I've helped pack trucks, trailers, car trunks. I've strained muscles walking desks down narrow stairways. I've given the goodbye handshake/hand bump/hug/wave more times than I can recall. And it's been a long time since I realized how many residences in this town I know only because friends used to live in them.

Today, I got to help another friend move. I'm glad for him...he's going to a very good post-doc, which will do great things for his career. And I know that he'll be back...for dissertation defense, for a conference, maybe more. But this wasn't the main thing in my thoughts. Instead, as we were sweating, hauling, cleaning, I realized two things.

First off, I love all my friends dearly. However, you learn a lot about people when there's a mass packing operation. I learned that as wonderful people as my friends are, most of them would never last in factory or warehouse work.

More importantly, though, I was comparing this summer to last, and I realized that, overall, I am in much better shape than I was a year ago. Only one friend is moving away, while two are actually moving back. And beyond that, there are any number of people in this town who, one year ago, were just faces I would see every so often. I'd see this guy at parties, this guy at the coffee shop, this couple only every so often...and now we're friends.

It's good to know that I've connected with a whole circle of people I didn't really know last year. It gives me hope that this time next year, I will know several more people, strangers that have turned into friends. It almost takes the sting away from thinking of all those people who, long having departed this small Ohio town, I see so infrequently.

Such are the bittersweet thoughts of summer.

spring break party!

It wasn't without its requirements. Their visit did require a modicum of prep work. The house needed a certain amount of rearrangement and cleaning. Both the spousal unit and I had a decent volume of our stuff in piles. The carpet was in need of a good vacuuming--the severe move-all-the-furniture variety. I also had to go and purchase some Honey Nut Cheerios, as we only had the unadulterated variety...and our house guests had certain...needs.

Their departure also showed the needs that had to be abandoned for the duration of their visit. Amongst the things that went by the wayside included workouts, salads, home-cooked meals, sobriety, bathroom visits with the door open...but these can all be set aside for a week. Friends are always worth it.

I do really love it when friends come to visit, and I try to go out of my way to get everything ready. It's one of the sincerely depressing things about academics is that you tend to lose friends on a normal basis. Some go crazy and socially disappear, but most just move away. I try to get people together at conferences, but conferences involve travel costs, lodging costs, registration costs, and vacation costs...besides the pesky little requirement of having to write another paper. Until all my friends have tenured jobs, this just isn't the perfect solution.

Luckily enough, my comrades dr. alex and thmarn are strange enough to actually want to come back to Bowling Green for their spring break. Somehow, my humble city beat out Palm Beach, Cancun, Key West, Tahiti, Stockholm, Lichtenstein, Bellingshausen Station, and many other spring break hot spots...so we got house guests!

It was one fun week. We got to do Howards Club H on multiple occasions, did the road trip thing, endured the "heteros gone wild" catcalls, ate out every single night (which, when I finally got back to my workouts, led me to pass out upon discovering my level of weight gain), danced with my spousal unit in a bar and accidentally dropped her on the cold floor, watched a fairly amusing movie and some horrific television. Generally, we had a blast.

However, I noticed a few things. First, we got to hang out with 80% of the people I know in Bowling Green. What was interesting about this was that most of them, I only get to see most of them every few weeks. This just proves I'm one of the least successful people I know at surrounding myself with a large posse. This always leads me to the quantity versus quality argument.

Second, we got to see some of our long distance friends, a few from Michigan and one from Cleveland (on top of our two visitors), so there was a little bit of a "high school reunion" feel to the evenings...except I really missed and wanted to see everyone there. It was amazing how easily we fell back into our old conversations. It was also sad when we had to leave them.

Finally, whenever we were being social, I noticed that we had a "it shall not be named" topic of conversation constantly floating around the periphery of our conversations. What was the common denominator?

Uncertainty. Very few of us know what we'll be doing next year...I'm one of the lucky few. Most others do not. Job announcements are down. Those that do get posted are just as likely to lose funding as move to the hiring stages. Existing jobs won't necessarily continue.

We all feel it. It's the human cost of the economy. It's no longer safe being a thinker, a teacher. And while I'm relatively stable for the next year or two, I do worry. The pressure of being an academic has always been dealing with an amount of uncertainty. However, now I also have to take on that of my friends.

I don't have many friends, but the ones I do have are magnificent. They are dealing with massive uncertainty. That uncertainty will, most likely, push them even further away.

The best I can do is dwell on the joys of our meetings...thankfully, we have enough good times to almost make up for the departures.

where my mind goes during walks

While on my daily coffee walk today (my knee having mysteriously healed after finishing the House paper), I came to two weird observations:

• The first thing I discovered was a new metaphor to describe my current state as an academic. I believe I am currently a cover band in a dive bar...good, serviceable, but not really able to do any of my own songs. With my current bout of research, I'm trying to slip a few in amongst the "Freebird" and "Stairway to Heavens" my University calls on me to perform, but the audience is too busy drinking to really pay attention.
  
  When I was an adjunct, I was a "fill-in" musician in a cover band, basically covering Fred's parts while he recovers from the flu. As a grad student, I was one of those "guitar player looking for band" ads at the music store bulletin board. I'm really hoping, with all the research I've done lately, to become an indie musician, and I'd love to be one of those artists who can play national tours. I do realize I'll never be a Grammy-winner, and I'll probably never be on the cover of the Rolling Stone (sing along with me!) (sorry, Almost Famous flashback), but that's okay...I'll never have the cool Cornell West hair anyway.
  
  
• I've been in Bowling Green to the point where I know more houses where friends used to live than I know current friend residents...which is really strange, and makes the whole daily walk that much more interesting.
  

'tis the season for unconsciousness

This morning, two good friends left after a long weekend visit...one marvelous friend defended a doctoral dissertation, and the partner accompanied for moral support and drinking opportunities. Since both are dear friends and readers of this blog, the spousal unit and I opened up our house to them...and they repaid our kindness by bringing Old Style 30s and by refraining from trashing casa DuBose.

Somewhere in the visit, however, I got an e-mail from another friend. He's moving away at the end of the summer and wants to go out and drink this week. I told him that I could be persuaded to agree.

Later, I received an e-mail from another friend. Him and his spousal unit are coming for a BG visit (not sure why, but whenever anyone talks about a BG visit, I always think of the line from Bull Durham: "People who leave the Carolina League don't come back"). Of course, we will get together, socialize, and inevitably drink.

What does this all mean? With friend 1 and 2's visit, there was consumption on last Wednesday, Thursday, Saturday, and Sunday. I go back to bar for friend 3 this Tuesday. Then starting Thursday, I have drinking with friends 4 and 5.

I like seeing good friends. I like socializing. I enjoy a beer or twelve. However, I doubt that I will be tremendously coherent come next week.

The dangers of summertime, I guess.

rolling frames

Last Thursday was the lovely spousal unit's birthday. To celebrate, we had a bowling extravaganza on Saturday. The main thing we learned? Proficiency at Wii bowling does not really translate to the real world.

I didn't get the hang of it right away...my first 6 balls were all gutters. Of course, when we had 10 minutes left on our lane, I started throwing strikes. My dad was a great bowler, which makes my own ineptness at the sport that much more disappointing.

As we were leaving, I thanked some of our friends for coming, because my spousal unit would've been heart-broken if people didn't show up. The response? "we couldn't break her heart...that would be like slaughtering puppies."

I want candy...

We had some friends over last night (tv night!), and here's an actual snippet of the conversation:

friend 1: I love M&Ms...they have the perfect kind of chocolate.

me: Of course, M&Ms are better when you only eat the same colored ones and pretend that they're pills of some sort, like amphetamines.

friend 2: I do that too!

friend 3: I sort them out by color, but then I eat one of one color, one of the next color, one of the next color, and go around like that.

This explains a lot, no?

on being a gentleman loser

Alternative Country musician Robbie Fulks once said that once you hit a certain age, country music is sitting there waiting on you. While I don't know about that (I'm a bit more open to country than I ever was, but I still like very little), I have found myself drifting more towards Steely Dan than I ever had.

When I was younger, I had grandiose notions of eventually becoming a rock star...and that was mixed in with a lot of loner hero imagery, which I suppose is pretty typical for a lot of angst-ridden, painfully shy teens. That mostly died in me bit by bit as a result of failed band attempts, failure to even get jam sessions with friends, and seeing the bands my friends did have destruct for a number of weird reasons, including egotistical band members, a key musician either starting to drink heavily or quit drinking altogether, or the stereotypical "band getting screwed by one too many bar owners."

It was probably just as well...most professional musicians either end up as drunk/drug addicts, in severe debt, divorced from their porn starlet wife, and the subject of a very embarrassing and formulaic VH-1 special, and I'm not just that telegenic.

When I adopted the student lifestyle, I initially assumed it would require monastic/hermit living conditions. At first, such a lifestyle was necessitated by the fact I was working 3 jobs while going for my M.A. When I started going for my Ph.D., I had a fair problem finding people in my department to drink with...one thought I was an alcoholic because I could have more than three beers in an evening.

Eventually, I found people to hang out with. Then, as we were all in grad school, they all moved out, and I found myself relatively friendless. I lucked into new friendships, and then those friends got jobs and moved away. So I got another batch of friends, only to have them either move or go into dissertation freakout mode. My last group of amazing best friends moved away last month, and I miss them terribly. And while by this time I realized that people would eventually scatter, it threw me a little more than did the previous times. By now, I don't work at BGSU and in fact have very little connection to the school, so I have no real idea who's gonna be my next hang-out friend...I just don't have many close contacts to my local hang-out scene. I am currently auditioning, and there are some really good candidates and wonderful people, but I'm not sure yet which ones of them will put up with me.

Aside from the transient nature of non-tenure academics, I have to put up with none of my departed friends being within close driving distance save two, and I'm really too busy to plan the full-day trips that hanging out with them would require. And I don't have time to do the Michigan-Wisconsin-Minnesota-Iowa road trip to go hit bars with departed friends/drinking buddies. Not only that, I have a number of friends who don't drink at all anymore. It's perfectly alright by me, and if someone doesn't feel it would be healthy mentally or physically for them to drink, I certainly have never wanted to push anyone towards it. But it does really change the normal evening out procedures in ways I still haven't 100% grasped.

The problem is that I still love the bars. I really enjoy drinking as a social activity... I'm long past doing it to alter my mood swings... and bars have a great ambiance that allows you to overcome social anxiety and limitations on suitable topics of conversation. As a result, I've had some of the best academic, theoretical, theological, and philosophical conversations of my life over minipitchers. Bars relax me. But going to bars by yourself is just a little creepy, let alone boring, and I don't really have many people right now who I can call up on a whim and ask if they wanna share some drafts.

It's left me feeling a bit like I'm pining after lost glories. That's where, I guess, my current Steely Dan infatuation comes in. When I listen to them, their music is largely "whatever happened to the world, and why isn't it as cool as it once was?"...and this is how I've been feeling.

As I was checking my mail, I had the mp3s on, and "Midnight Cruiser" came up. I got a bit fixated on the line "For one more time, let your madness run with mine."

Most of the people with whom my madness used to run now live elsewhere. Consider this an open call.

FLA trip...quote of the visit

During our recent trip to the ancestral homeland, I got to see a whole bunch of friends, most of the ones I was expecting to see, and a few that took me by surprise. One of those, who I did not even know was living in Jax, had the quote of the trip: "My brother just broke up with his long-term girlfriend...and then got a chin implant."

quote of the night

Last night, on the way home from the bars: "I don't think I really have that much of an alternative lifestyle...I get up, I watch some TV, I go out and drink"...

another potential blog reader!

My friend Meredith has a blog called "I Want a Pony"...the link's to
the right. Well, she didn't get a pony, but she did get a healthy
daughter at 5:30 today. A hearty cheer and toast to Sydney
Katherine...welcome to the game.

conversation as an event

Somewhere around the time I was 24, me and my father started to go out together and watch Monday Night Football at a sports bar. At the time, I was just getting back into football after a long exile, and it seemed as good as a place as any to continue this return to a sport which I used to love (and have come to love again).

We moved from bar to bar, year after year. We drank plenty of beer, ate plenty of wings. We watched a lot of football...and yes, it was good.

The football, however, was secondary. What ended up happening more than anything else was that I got to know my father as a person. Before the football nights, he had been just "Dad"...someone I loved, for sure, but not someone I really knew. This was really no one's fault...he was in the military for ages, and he did work a lot, but I was a moody, uncommunicative kid (how much has changed...(?)) who really didn't bond with too many people, and that sure didn't help. I got my mother because I spent a lot of time with her, but my father remained a little bit of a mystery.

Monday Night Football changed all that. We got to just talk. I found out that at work, when I was pizza manager guy, I operated just like he did, disciplined just like he did. I got to hear stories of his youth and compare them with my own. I heard Vietnam stories...clearly not all of them, but probably more than anyone else in my family has heard. I discovered that I liked him as a person, not just a father. We became friends.

When I moved up here to Ohio, one of the hardest things was watching that first Monday Night Football game by myself...

I never found anyone else to watch football with on a normal basis. My first roomate, the year before he moved in, used to come over on occasion, but when he moved in, he was never around, especially, it seemed, on Monday nights. A friend of mine used to live downstairs, but he'd only come up once a month. When we were dating, my wife would watch with me, and we would talk...and this was one of the places where I really got to know her and fall in "true love" with her...but she really doesn't enjoy football as a sport, and now that we live together and have other times to talk, she usually goes elsewhere. So football is, unfortunately, sadly, a solitary activity for me.

I've tried to find other activities to fill the void. One of the things I decided when I came up here and started studying Popular Culture was (sensibly, I think) that I needed to experience more Popular Culture. One of the things I did to this end was start watching the various Star Treks.

But I also started watching wrestling, at first as a "I need to figure out what the hell is going on here" activity...but then I found some fellow grad students who watched, so I would hang out with them. When they moved away, I found another student, one from my department, and I started going to the bars to watch the pay-per-view events with him. Eventually, I started going to his house to watch the weekly broadcasts, and I've been doing this at least since 2002.

Last night, me and a few of the regular wrestling watchers went to a TNA Wrestling event up in Detroit. While the show was, itself, very entertaining, a few things happened that made me really reflect on the nature of viewing, conversation, and friendship.

One of my friends, the one at whom's we watch wrestling, is moving away. He moves out this weekend. Although there have been rumors, I found this out for sure last night. I found out because another one of my friends asked him. And, after hearing this, I wonder if I would've known if someone would've asked.

I had loved watching wrestling with my friends...at first, just because I love my friends. I did grow to love the entertainment, but it has always been secondary for me. We were doing more than watching a stupid televised version of a fictional athletic competition...we were building community.

Or so I used to think.

After my friend's revelation, I started to wonder about the state of friendship altogether. Is it even possible to have friendships centered around one activity? Does that just lead to situational friendships? How well would I relate to many of them outside of the situation of wrestling viewing? And is the fact that I rarely can get them to do things other than wrestling a sign that they have these kind of thoughts as well?

None of these thoughts diminished how much I like this guy. I guess that what I hope for when I enter one of these hang-out situations is that the friendships I develop can expand beyond the actual event, that they can spread, that we can do other things, and that the event will quickly become secondary to everyone. But I don't seem to be able to get these situational friends to do anything else, for the most part. Is this, I wonder, due to the way that other people view their activities and the situational friends associated with them? Or is the fault somewhere within me?

Even though I've always been a quiet, shy kind of guy in many ways, I've also always had a thirst for friends, and I want more close friends. Right now, however, there's probably only three people in town with whom I can hang out regardless of the situation or event and just talk, hold a good conversation, and have that be the center of whatever we're doing, not the event or place where we're meeting...and I love these people dearly...but one of them has a family, and another one is busily dissertating, so that can limit contact. I wish I could pull them all to a quiet bar just to talk on a regular basis...and it's a shame that our schedules often limit this. I enjoy these people, but most of all, I need them at some deep level.

And I do have plenty of friends who live outside of Bowling Green, people whom I love and feel tremendously close to, but the distances can work against us there. I try to maintain contact, but I always get caught up in my work, and I never can do enough to be as close to these people as I would like. I've done an okay job with some, not so good with others, and others still have fallen off the face of the earth for me...much to my sadness. I try, but I never seem to have the time to put into overcoming the distances.

So, last night, I was thinking these thoughts when I got home. I should've been elated from the very good wrestling show and the fine conversation that did result, but instead, frankly, I was feeling a bit morose.

I got ready for bed and brushed my teeth. I tried to quietly crawl into bed, but my wife moved...I thought I had woken her up, but she assured me that she just went to bed herself. I told her I had a good night.

Then, my wife, my lover, my friend, held me...and that made everything go away, made everything disappear, save my wife's touch.

Sometimes, if you're lucky, you don't need an event or a reason...and you don't even need the conversation...

literalism

I'm in grading papers. I have a sign on the door which says "Please knock...I'm in, just working." One of my more insane colleagues just knocked on the door. She didn't want anything, but she said she felt she had to follow instructions...

what's wrong with the world in general

My friend Jim "Iowa Thunder" Davis graduates tomorrow with his Ph.D....further proof that any idiot can get one. Nothing personal, Jim...after all, I'm example 1.