Keeping an online journal is kind of like NASA’s Voyager. But instead of sending out the Brandenburg Concertos and the structure of a DNA molecule, we send our thoughts and feelings and perceptions out into the ether for others to stumble across. And you know what? It’s just as important. What one person thinks about one little thing on one particular day is just as important as the greatest accomplishments in the history of humanity. Because it’s those little things that mean we exist in the first place, that make existence worthwhile.

Why I Write, by the Tinman.

I just biked in from home, and boy, are my legs tired! I mean it… they’re tired. It’s only fifteen miles, but it’s the first time I made the trip on bike. The first twelve miles or so, no problem. Country roads, next to no traffic, a few hills. Then I hit a major road into town (with no side roads with which to avoid it). There, the pedaling was good, but the traffic was a bit rough. But then, I crossed the river well within sight of downtown. The hills there just about did me in – I don’t think I’ll be able to make it up the other way going back tonight. I’ll just have to walk a small stretch. But I made it. It’s a big milestone for me. I’ve wanted to do this since I moved out there last spring, but kept finding all sorts of excuses. Now, I know I can make it, and I’ll try to do it a few times a week.

Michael Stipe expands on his speed bump protest sign with a letter to the editor in today’s paper.

There’s a side street in town often used as a shortcut between two major roads. I go down it often, though I’ve recently found a better shortcut. It’s a residential street than also has a private school on it. Recently, after calls from residents to take action, the city tried to calm traffic by installing giant speed bumps at several locations across the road. These are the several inches high, several feet wide, kind of speed bumps. R.E.M. front man Michael Stipe, who owns a rental house on the street, is not at all happy. Personally, I find them welcome. If you drive the speed limit, you don’t even have to slow down. But if you’re speeding, they’ll mess your car up. One morning, as I was driving through the school zone (complete with flashin yellow lights), I had a jerk in a big truck pass me doing sixty or so. This was not unusual.

Trying to change the way we buy music, the Record Store opens today in San Francisco. Their inventory is simple: a single CD, sold for $5. There’s no label, no track listing, no notion of what’s on it. The tracks are picked from a wide variety of genres from anywhere in the world. Each CD comes numbered, and you can visit their website, key in the number, and discover (a little at a time, spread over a couple weeks) more about what you’re listening to. They plan on cutting five CDs a month. No word yet if they’ll mail these things out.

When I was being recruited by colleges, I paid attention to the school’s drama program. I was going into physics, but I loved drama. The school I selected, New Mexico Tech, proudly told me that even though they were a small school filled to the brim with nerds, they still did at least one big play a year. I was even shown pictures from the recently done A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum. I’d already decided Tech was the place for me, but this was icing on the cake. The year I got there, they stopped doing theater. I didn’t have any trouble finding theater, though. I brought together a group of folks and did radio drama at the campus radio station. As upperclassmen, I helped found an official club whose purpose was to promote drama and writing. The “Liberal Arts Guild” we called ourselves. A spot of humanities at a nerd school. I directed our first offering, Woody Allen’s God , paired with Sartre’s No Exit. More offerings followed, including Our Town , where I got to reprise my high school senior role as “Stage Manager”. A fine community theater sprung up, and I did several shows with them, including a production of Othello that we toured to New Mexico’s four corners area. When I left school, of course the university started doing official shows again. Now, I’m glad they didn;t while I was in school, as it opened all kinds of doors for me to do my own theater the way I wanted. I probably wouldn’t be directing today had I just been a mere actor in someone else’s shows. I bring up all this because Tech is now doing a production of Into the Woods , and SChlake has lots and lots of pictures. It shouldn’t surprise me that I don’t know anyone in the cast or crew, but I was hoping to see a few familiar faces.

All last week it was summer around here. Temperatures in the upper eighties, little rain. Spring had given us a miss and summer went ahead and got started. My garden is filled with cool-loving vegetables, and they were rather disgusted with the sudden heat, giving them notions of flowering already when they were only a few inches high. The chickens, tropical birds that they are, loved it. They walked around by day, fluttering their wings, picking grass, and chasing bugs. At night, they fought over the top step of the ladder that is currently serving as their perch. I really like temperatures in the mid-seventies, but I didn’t mind the eighties so much. Drives into town involved an open sunroof for the first time in months, and I even biked a few miles for the first time since fall. I decided to bike into work (about 15 miles) a couple times a week starting this week. But then nature realized what she forgot. And last night it froze. We had warning, so everything was OK. The summer vegetable seedlings got moved indoors. The chickens got their heat lamp back. I shut the sunroof. We ran out of propane a few weeks ago, so inside we turned on the electric heaters and pretended it was January again. This morning, I inspected the garden, bundled up in coat and gloves. The veggies doubled in size overnight, I think, so happy they were to be cold again. The broccoli and rutabegas were particularly tickled. The wildlife were out enjoying the crisp morning as well. A few deer that have moved in since the cows moved out were across the pasture. A red headed woodpacker, usually heard banging away at trees across the road, was hammering for bugs right over my head, fifteen feet away. I’m sure the flock of turkeys were near, but I didn’t see them. It’ll freeze again tonight even more, dropping down to 25 degrees or so. And it’ll be right back to the eighties by Saturday. In two days. It’s not much of a Spring, but I’ll take what I get.

I am very bad at maintaining long-distance relationships. And I don’t mean romances, but just the simple act of keeping up with the friends that I have scattered literally around the globe. There are so many people out there that I have let slip away by not keeping up with the letter writing. Email was supposed to make this all so much easier, but it hasn’t. That’s one reason why I maintain this weblog. It’s my way of upholding my side of dozens of conversations with people I know here and yon. My acknowledgement that I can’t be counted on to reply to letters in a timely way, if at all. But I know my friends are interested in what I’m doing with my life now, just as I am interested in theirs. And I absolutely love to get mail (electronic or otherwise) from them, telling me about their days. Even better, though, is when they have a weblog or journal of their own. Even though by nature it’s a public document, I can pretend that they are writing to me, and I am writing to them. Add in an occasional personal letter, and it’s almost like we’re still living lives close together. And should we ever get together again, face to face, we can pick up conversation just like we’ve never been apart. But of all the people I’ve lost touch with, only a very few have an online journal. And with my horrid skill at keeping the lines of communication open, most of them are lost to me. There was one person here in Athens that I briefly knew. I met her through theater, but didn’t really see her often. She discovered this weblog, and we regularly emailed each other. She’s a very neat person, but just as we were getting past the “getting to know you” phase, she moved away. To Japan. I had her email address, but like most everyone else I’ve an address for, I lost her. So imagine my excitement when she let it known she has an online diary, What Luna Sees. I can catch up on the last six months of life in Japan, and regain that feeling of proximity. And what’s more, she can write. Boy howdy, can she write. I’m glad to have found you again, Kim.

Gabba gabba hey, gabba R.I.P.

I’ve just visited Born in Slavery: Slave Narratives from the Federal Writers’ Project, 1936-1938, a project hosted by the Library of Congress, and I’ve lost all eloquence. In the thirties, interviews were conducted with former slaves. Their personal stories are touching beyond words. So many people have this notion that slavery ended ages and ages ago. Ancient history. But that’s not the case. My grandfather was older than I am when these interviews were taken. I don’t know my family history as well as I should, but his grandfather could have easily been a Union soldier. There’s so much visual reminders of slavery down here still. Canals still used that were dug bu slaves with shovels. Big piles of rock cleared from pasture and farm land, covered with fifteen decades of lichen. Rows of tiny sharecropper cabins abandoned and overgrown, modeled directly from slave quarters. You don’t have to look far to see what society down here used to be based on. Many thanks to RandomWalks for the link.