Posts tagged personal
I’ve been thinking a lot about my grandmother lately. Part of that is probably because each year for Groundhog Day she would use a butter knife to draw a groundhog in the peanut butter of our sandwiches for school. Part of it is the fact I just realized she died 15 years ago, on Dec. 4, 1996. And part of it is that today is 10 years since the house she lived in when I was growing up burnt down.
After she fell, broke her hip, and came to live with us in 1990, one of my uncles moved into the house. The house I grew up in is the last in a row of four houses, and my uncles and aunts lived in the other three.
I was living at home when the fire happened, and I was home from work early. I had grand designs on writing all about the fire for today, but it would have taken weeks, and a narrative of a fire and its aftermath doesn’t really capture what happened.
It’s hard to watch the house where some of your earliest memories happened burn. To see the huge plate window where your grandmother taught you to identify birds blackened with soot. To have the linoleum floor that supported the kitchen table where you learned to love to drink coffee heat up, sag and collapse. To watch the ivy that had been growing along the front of the house since long before you were born burn off and never return.
The weeks after the fire were spent cleaning out debris, burying the dozen stray cats my aunt had taken in, rolling out the project cars my uncle kept in the garage, even though everyone knew he was never going to work on them, putting the things that escaped the flames but were saturated with the woody, sharp smell of smoke into plastic bins so they could be cleaned.
It’s a brick house, so it’s still standing. It took most of two years, but my uncle and aunt moved back in. Now it’s their house. And though I’ve been inside dozens of times since the fire, I can’t tell you what the inside of the house looks like. I can’t shake the memories of the hardwood floors, the white metal beds my brother and I slept in, the big console TV and bigger console record player. When I visit, I half expect to sit at a table that’s been stopped from wobbling only by a piece of cardboard folded up and wedged under a leg, and sitting on high-backed green vinyl chairs that your legs would stick to in the summer. I think I might catch a glimpse of elementary-school-aged me sitting at that table, watching “Reading Rainbow” on a television sitting atop an old foot-powered Singer sewing machine, or my grandmother, still on her own in her 80s, using the yellow push-powered vacuum to clean the area rug in the dining room. Maybe I hope to see the blue glass vase that sat on top of the perpetually out-of-tune piano—the vase that my mother told me dated back to before the Civil War when a pillow fight with my brother nearly knocked it to the floor.
But though I’m welcome whenever I want to come over, the house where my grandmother lived is gone now, just as she is.
Some early lessons from this month
Things have been hectic at Chez OTAM, but I have all the tracks laid down. I’m likely going to re-record the vocals tonight, then mix it and should post it soon. But I’ve been thinking about what I’ve learned. I don’t think everything we do teaches us a lesson, but I have gotten a few out of this month.
1) I’m not sure how to blog about the progress I make on a single thing without becoming repetitive. If I decide to build or sew something, it’s easy to mark progress. But writing: “Still recording vocals” or “On my nth draft” doesn’t sound very interesting.
2) Ironic distance and creativity don’t mix very well. As I posted yesterday, you have to commit to something, and holding it at arm’s length doesn’t work. That is hardly a unique idea, but one I need to bear in mind.
3) I don’t know that I’ll ever be happy with the things I make. I’ve tried to make the song as good as I can—not easy, I’m a so-so musician at best—and I think that’s a start.
4) Sometimes I feel like this resolution was really on to re-wire my brain so I can focus on things other than work and sitting on the couch. We’re 22 days into the year and not one has passed where I haven’t at least thought about this project. And I’ve been busy at work, as well.
So we’re starting into the home stretch of my first project. And I seemed to have learned a few things.
In which I complain too much, as always
When I went to Pittsburgh in September, I got a ticket for lapsed registration. It wasn’t actually lapsed, but whatever. The costs was to be $125, and it was going to cost more than that to fight it, so it just wasn’t worth the effort. I put the ticket aside and forgot to pay it—of course.
I sent a money order last week because I’m going to be driving through Indiana this week to go back to Pittsburgh for Christmas, and on Friday, I confirmed they’d gotten the payment. So imagine my surprise when I got home Friday to find a notice that my license was going to be suspended in Iowa for non-payment of that ticket.
No big deal, right? After a short freakout, I realized I’d just have to call on Monday to get a receipt from Indiana and this would all go away.
But when I called the court, I was told they don’t give out receipts, that I should have sent a self-addressed stamped envelope if I wanted one, and that it would take at least three weeks to inform Iowa that I’d paid—by which time my license was suspended.
I convinced an Iowa DOT worker to call Indiana, and they did, eventually, send a receipt, so it’s finally taken care of, but why on earth wouldn’t they help me?
I realize I’m to blame for all of this, and mostly I’m glad that the Iowa DOT folks were willing to go above and beyond, but I just don’t understand why the Indiana court employees weren’t willing to do the bare minimum to make sure my license didn’t get suspended because of slow bureaucracy.
TL;DR: My license was going to be suspended, but now it’s not. I still feel the need to bitch, though.
It’s always the same, sad story
I rush to get through something, to get it finished, to feel productive. I don’t check my work as closely as I should.
There’s a mistake, and it needs to be done again.
I have to re-encoded gigabytes of video and burn dozens of DVDs now. I’d like to say this taught me a lesson. But it’s not like it’s the first time.
Yay, a new symptom!
Since last night, I’ve had what feels like a gas bubble in my right side. I figured it was from eating too much fat, but not only is it not going away, it’s getting worse. Didn’t respond to Percocet last night, but I’m hoping it will now. It feels like a gallbladder attack, but that seems unlikely, as I left my gallbladder behind when I left the hospital on Monday. Waiting for Emily to get home to take me to the ER.
Dammit, I want to go back to work tomorrow. I like what I do, and I don’t like sitting in bed all day.
Just had my last food until tomorrow sometime
I know this is a super minor procedure, so I’m doing my best not to freak out about it.
Editor Edith Hughes was captivated by community journalism - Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
I want to do this right, because she deserves it, and because she might haunt me otherwise.
Within minutes of my first meeting Edith, she was yelling at me. I’d missed one question—its vs. it’s—on the three-page proofing test you took before you interviewed. That was too easy a question to miss in her opinion. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t offer me a job. Or perhaps it was the fact that I’d written precisely one story for a newspaper when I was in college, and only did that because I had a crush on the editor of the school paper and she asked nicely. Or perhaps it was the fact that I brought in the first page of my senior thesis, a letter to the editor and a poem as my writing samples.
Eventually, though, she did offer me a job. It was early October in 2001. I spent most of the next 12 months trying and failing to impress her. She told me that I understood how to put sentences together, but that my writing was a sure cure for insomnia. She told me that I was playing cute with hard news.
Very occasionally, she’d give me a compliment.
She was an editor of the old type: Gruff, imperious at times and demanding. She was in charge of a dozen or so community weekly newspapers. It’s easy to dismiss those papers as pure fluff or irrelevant, but she worked to make sure they were neither. She took the work seriously and taught the reporters to do the same. If not for the encouragement (positive and negative) she gave, I wouldn’t have gotten my first job at a daily paper.
A few years after I’d left, I came back to visit people at the office. I ran into Edith and told her that I’d gotten a job as city editor at the paper where I worked. She thought about it for a second and asked, “So you learned something here?”
Yes, yes I did.
In the summer of 1999, I was fairly serious about playing guitar. I played a local place’s open mic night every week for the entire summer, and I kept getting better. I wanted a decent electric guitar. My first electric was a 1960s Kent Las Vegas that barely held a tune. I traded it in for a better acoustic guitar. For my birthday in 1998, my parents gave me the money to buy a Peavy stratocaster copy from a friend and a practice amp.
By summer, I wanted something more distinctive. I sold it at the Music-Go-Round, and they gave me way less than it was worth. It was a strat copy, after all. Well made, sure, but one of literally dozens that would be in the store.
I had two options for nicer guitars: a Les Paul Studio (wine red, if I remember right, with uncovered humbucker pickups) and the Epiphone Sorrento above. The Les Paul was more expensive, but it was clearly the smart buy. Made in America, a real Gibson, way more versatile. But the Epiphone spoke to me. Gold flake paint, chrome hardware, thin and light, like something out of the past. It’s almost exactly the same bodyas the Gibson Byrdland, and Ted Nuegent recorded “Cat Scratch Fever” on a Byrdland. I hate Ted Nuegent and that song, but whatever. It’s the same shape, but much thinner, as the Gibson ES-295, and had the P-90 single coil pickups, just like the ES-295. Scotty Moore used the 295 on all of Elvis’ Sun Records hits. So I pulled out my credit card and went home with the Sorrento. It was great. One time, I thought I’d join my college’s Jazz Ensemble. I took what little sight-reading skills I had for guitar (learned during one semester of classical guitar, during which I played a Silvertone nylon string guitar with a black-painted pine fingerboard handed down from my grandfather), put on flatwound strings and had a go. I decided jazz wasn’t for me. But I played. Every day, I played. My girlfriend at the time would occasionally hide my guitars so I’d do my homework instead of practicing.
I graduated and moved home. I stayed unemployed for months, and I lost all interest in everything that wasn’t sitting on the couch watching “Law and Order” re-runs. I got a job and got busy. I moved out, and lived in an apartment, so when I was getting ready to play, usually at 9 o’clock at night or later, I couldn’t, because unlike most electrics, it had a fully hollow body. Playing it without an amp wasn’t any quieter than playing my acoustic guitar.
One day, the volume pots were making scratchy noises when I turned them. I tried WD-40, but it didn’t help. Then the jack stopped working, and because it was a one-piece hollow body, I couldn’t take it apart to fix it. So it sat in its case, and I told myself that one year I’d use my tax refund to pay for repairs. I didn’t.
This was one of the last times it was ever out of its case in my presence: fall 2005. I was practicing light painting, where you put an object in a dark room, open the camera shutter, and use a flashlight to paint the object.
By summer 2007, we were planning to move halfway across the country. We needed to get rid of stuff. I sold it and the amp on Craigslist for next to nothing. I sold one of my acoustics, too. So now my collection is a borrowed Washburn strat copy (nowhere near as nice as the Peavy), an old Cort 12-string that I have six strings on, an Epiphone acoustic that belonged to Emily and a cheap ukulele.
I still almost never play.
Today I hopefully find out how much it will cost to fix my car
Oh, and I forgot my anxiety medicine at home. Should be awesome.
