The Faulkner House

Andy and I drove through "downtown" Harrisburg today--the really old part by the river, down on second street--and we discovered that it's actually just straight up Creepy. One of the creepiest places I've EVER BEEN, actually, without exaggeration of any measure--and that list includes eerie, hair-bristling ghost towns in Montana and Colorado, places where people haven't lived in ages. Good ol' Harrisburg'll give them a run for their money...
There's an ancient, dilapidated, Victorian-style mansion down there by the river that absolutely cannot be without ghosts (or at least an extremely demented resident with a chip on his/her shoulder and an arsenal of leftover Civil War weaponry). It honestly looks like the set from Nothing But Trouble, a well-intended 1991 Dan Aykroyd comedy that will actually give you nightmares for at least a week after viewing. This movie is in no way recommended, except in reference to this post so that you can get some idea of the caliber of creepiness we're dealing with here.

Until today I had only seen the more normal sectors of town--the comfortable suburbias where kids play on teeter-totters and everybody's got a fence, a black lab, a bed of gladiolas, and an American flag motif in the front yard. So I was a little taken aback by the downright weirdness of the downtown. It didn't help that as we drove through, two rather steely-eyed, Cowboy Dan types stared down our car in a vaguely predatory manner.

Ooga booga, kids. I'm not joking either.

Anyway, we've pretty much written off actually living in H-burg, not only for that reason, but because occasionally (yes) we like to get wildly drunk in the comfort of our own home and rock out in the back yard to Slanted and Enchanted. I'm fairly certain that kind of behavior (or that kind of music) would not fly in an establishment such as Harrisburg. It's probably far better that we live either in isolation or around similarly youthful neighbors whose kids I won't teach on a daily basis.

We found a place that we're looking at again tomorrow, out in the middle of nowhere. It has the potential to be pretty cool with some work, but it's got kind of an unkempt yard and a bunch of debris that we'd have to contend with (like chopped wood that was never stacked, dead flowers in overturned flowerpots, carcasses of decaying walnuts in all of the flowerbeds, and shotgun shells on the back porch where someone had been shooting at god-knows-what). But frankly, it is a little bit creepy right now--it has an apocalyptic feeling of abandonment about it, like some family just dropped everything and fled town. The house is big and white and old-school, and there's a lone hog living in a shed to the west of the back yard... we've been puzzling over who's been caring for it and why it is alone.
Anyway, the whole place has kind of a Faulknerish feeling about it, and I'm not so sure that I want to live there. We might rattle around like loose cogs in a house with too much space, alone and young in the middle of nowhere.
Just maybe.

Shit, I don't know.

I complain about Eugene sometimes, but the truth is that I will miss walking down to Prince Pucklers and watching some 55-year-old dude in a Utilikilt order a scoop of Raspberry Truffle on a waffle cone. I kind of love the variety of it all. It keeps you young and openminded.

Addendum RE: words and phrases that make my skin crawl, 2008 edition.

A new (but long-loathed) addition to the list:
When people describe crying as "bawling."
No, people--no.

I cannot seem to find a decent small house in Junction City, Coburg, Santa Clara, or Harrisburg [H-ville] for less than $1100 a month. $1100 a month! When my housemate is a student without a job! That's a small fortune! That's like... half my monthly paycheck as an underpaid and non-tenured teacher. I kid you not. Throw me a freaking bone here, Willamette Valley. I am not going to live in another goddamned apartment now that I have a career. . . am I?

I never want to hear the word 'apartment' again. For full details surrounding the reaons why 'apartment' has become a four-letter word in my life, please see the following colorful character profiles of the enlightening individuals I've lived amongst over the last six years.

1. The Instamatic Chromatic Trombone Man. See previous post for details.

2. The Downstairs Domestic Dispute Family: proving that the best part of waking up is indeed not Folgers' in your cup, but rather, the sound of shattering glass and sobbing downstairs at 8:00 AM on a Sunday. (There's a post in the archives about this lovely couple, which includes Andy and I calling the police and someone being hauled away in a police car in a most dramatic fashion, but I don't want to bother looking up the link.)

3. The Elizabethan Floutist/Space Cadet. This lady lives right next door to me, and although I like her as a human being, she constantly plays some of the most irritating and seasonally-inappropriate music imaginable on a cloyingly cheery instrument that sounds like a cross between a clarinet and a flute. None of the industrial-quality earplugs that I've tried can overwhelm her instrument's high pitch, so gradually, I've become more accustomed to it . . . but occasionally when I'm doing intense law homework and she's tootling away next door, I want to scream a bit and maybe set something on fire. Last year, this lady spent about six months practicing her "Flight of the Bumblebee"-reminiscent part for a symphony that was performing (honest to God) "cacophonous music." The part that she practiced had no rhyme or reason, but repeated itself eerily so that I knew exactly when each assaulting bar of trilling and tweedling would start and end--and I was really relieved when the symphony for this piece was over, because the lady's constant practicing next door gave me perpetual feelings of paranoia while I was in the apartment. It was like living in a Hitchcock movie or something. The Birds.
More recently, now that it's July and all, the floutist lady next door has begun practicing for The Nutcracker Suite. It's pretty surreal when it's 95 degrees in the apartment and I have to listen to 90 minutes' worth of butchered bars from "Flight of the Sugar Plum Fairy." But she's got to make that December performance deadline, I guess...

4. Janie* the Shih-Tzu-toting coke dealer/dance major. She was a nice but slightly manic girl who ran a 24-hour rock shop in the alley in which the front (and only) door of my studio apartment was located. Through my living room/bedroom window, at any given hour of the day, I could see all kinds of dynamic and drunken characters hanging around in front of her apartment, and quite regularly, they woke or kept me up until about 3 AM with their Socratic dialogs. On a positive note, I guess this gave me a sense that I was living in a city much larger and more rugged than Eugene. I could be wrong, but I think it was not entirely unlike living under some bridge in San Fransisco.

5. Miss Hurff. I'll refrain from saying more, except these keywords: epic proportions of Jack Daniels, a mistreated man named Jimmy, a cat named Cheech, and another housemate with some pretty gnarly drug-related connections that I was not immediately aware of. After six months of bizarrity, I moved out. And fled to another state, and avoided phone-calls from aforementioned parties.

6. Peter* and the Wolf. Suzanne (the only awesome housemate I've lived with, aside from Andy,) knows this story well, for she was there with me: Peter*, our upstairs neighbor, was a bird researcher who had recently gone on an avian expedition to Alaska to do some graduate coursework. He returned from the Northern Hinterlands with a wolf-creature--a truly enormous and vaguely predatory-looking dog, which he named Cooper, or as I liked to call him, Pooper. (Pooper had parasites that the vet "had never even seen," which I thought was kind of ominous, but his bird-loving owner joked about his as though it was an entertaining tidbit of trivia. I wonder if little ol' Peter's* bowels are still intact.) Anyway, one day Peter* left Pooper in the apartment alone while he went out on the town. As far as we could gather, the ensuing flooding incident (known as the Great Flood of '03) unfolded like this: Pooper found some delectable dirty dishes in the sink and began to snort his way through them, and as he did so, he bumped his head on the tap, turning on the water. The sink, clogged with dirty dishes and nasty food, could not drain, and soon water began to overflow, flooding the entire upstairs apartment. The door to Peter's* apartment was locked, of course, so all of us living downstairs had no idea what was happening until water began to rain from our plaster ceiling; when we figured out something was going on upstairs, we couldn't do anything to stop it except call the manager. We covered everything in our living room with plastic tarps, placed buckets in strategic locations, and waited for the rain to stop. But it was a bummer because we'd just painted the living room and the ceiling mottled and peeled, and because, like, our living room was raining.

I could tell you about Maeve, the truly evil first roomate I had in the dorm at OSU. But I won't.
I'll just say that the six disastrous encounters above, even excluding Maeve, are enough to justification for anyone to cringe at the thought of living in an apartment setting EVER AGAIN.

A house, yes--that's what I need. For under $1100 a month though, damnit.

(*Names have been changed. God knows why.)

Dear you.

Dear apparently-obsessive-compulsive-neighbor-across-the-courtyard
who-has-played-incessant-rounds-of-chromatic-scales
with-little-to-no-rhythmic-variation
for-the-last-three-months
on-his-INFERNAL-TROMBONE
at-the-most-inconvenient-hours-of-the-day,

There's a marked difference between knowing the alphabet and writing an epic novel.

Please a) generalize this message to fit the context of own not-so-private musical conundrum, and b) tattoo it on your right forearm (the one that so skillfully maneuvers the slidey-slidey apparatus of your notorious noisemaker).

Mhmm,
Your neighbor Nilly.

This is just to say

I fucking HATE my Law and Governance class and I've just struggled with an assignment for three goddamn hours without getting anywhere.
Got NOWHERE.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.

Bon anniversaire.

Four years ago today, while working on the Lewis Brown Farm amongst the cherries, I gave an adorable, floppy-hat-wearing, tractor-driving farm boy (who I didn't know at all) a mix CD featuring old Modest Mouse, The Shins, The Magnetic Fields, Sparklehorse, Paul Simon, Ben Folds, My Morning Jacket, The Decemberists (oh God, I know), The Kinks, Wilco, Stephen Malkmus and the Jicks, and--yes--my phone number, hastily scrawled in permanent pen before I could lose my courage and leave it out.
It was the most daring thing I've ever done. Something about the floppy-hat boy compelled me to undertake this unabashedly crazy act--it was an instinctive feeling I'd gotten when I first saw him. I immediately knew we fit together somehow; there was a strong magnetic pull of an interaction that needed to unfold, and I wasn't sure what it would lead toward--but it seemed necessary to find out.

My boss, Annie, with a twinkle in her eye, gave me an excuse to return some tools to the farm boy so I could deliver my mix to him somewhat discreetly, although in retrospect I'm fairly certain the entire farm crew knew I fancied him. I handed the harvest boxes over to him with the mix on top, and tried to look nonchalant as I gave a wave and drove away up the dusty gravel road. Victory was mine. I'm certain that, at that very moment, millions of shy sisters worldwide lit candles in honor of my well-executed daring deed.

Unbelievably, the farm boy called me right after work, and that evening we went to the Beanery on 2nd Street in Corvallis: our first date. We were so awkward. He talked obsessively about politics, and I talked obsessively about music; he rambled about backpacking through Tasmania with his best friend, and I blathered on about art, because the only places I'd really been were those I'd painted on canvas and envisioned in books. We were really dissimilar, but in our time together we reveled and grew individually in the eclecticism of our relationship (and we still do). We had only a left month together until he needed to move to Montana, and we milked it for all it was worth, swimming at the river and wandering up the beach, buying goodies at the co-op, making picnic lunches.
Five months after he left for Missoula--after literally hundreds of dollars spent on phone cards and hundreds of hours spent talking over hundreds of miles--I moved to Missoula to go to school with him, and we had an epic adventure together so far away from everything we knew.
Four years later, we've certainly had our growing pains and moments of chaos and distance and idiocy (mostly on my part; refer to last December for details, or please don't). We even survived my year of super-intensive graduate school, which I watched systematically eliminate the relationships of nearly everybody around me over a span of 12 months. We made it, my farmboy and I. It's hardly believable that one little mix kicked off the soundtrack to this entire adventure, but it did--and it's kept rolling with great resilience and beauty despite enormous obstacles. I'm so grateful to be with him.

My farmboy is in Alaska commercial fishing tonight, and he'll be gone for another three weeks. But this evening I'll raise my Beanery iced coffee to him from a thousand miles away, put on my dress (the only one I own, bought today because I know he'll like it), and dance by myself to a new mix tape: one we've made together from the songs that have accompanied us through our grab-bag of shared experiences.

I'll bet that if you open your windows, you can listen too.

To Andy Livesay, with love.

I am losing my ability to speak in cohesive sentences, and I think it's because Andy has been away for so long.
Love = language?

Bastardizations of English.

Words and Phrases That Make My Skin Crawl, revised 2008 edition. (Please forgive any repeats; I have ongoing battles with certain aspects of the English language in use.)

1. When people refer to flip-flops as "thongs." Obviously, if they'd ever attended a state university during the era in which it was popular for sorority girls to wear low-riders and show their G-stringed buttcracks in lecture hall, they'd know why I am opposed to their misuse of this word--but invariably it's someone older than 30 who's throwing around "thong" like nobody's business. Please, stop.
2. The word "germane," which is being used as a popular replacement for "relevant," an infinitely better word that accomplishes the same purpose without making you sound like you've recently immigrated from the reference section of the Law Library. I think I developed a real hatred of "germane" during this graduate program, when it was, like, THE hip word among dorky Professors of Education. I started to take tallies of the number of times this word was uttered during each lecture I attended, but there were too many to bother adding up.
3. The word "ubiquitous," which, I've decided, is actually just a keyword that people throw into their otherwise rudimentary vocabularies in order to make themselves sound (temporarily) more intelligent--that is, until the recipient of their bombast realizes they've misused it entirely. (I'm tipping my hat to you, Chicago Trustafarian.)
4. The term "quick and dirty," as in "This is just a quick and dirty explanation of Oregon's Student Free Speech statute." Why? Because it sounds raunchily sexual to everybody except the oblivious and be-frocked 50-something professor who keeps repeating it offhandedly during lecture.
(Have I mentioned this before? I think so.)

Alright, alright.

Fifteen songs that sound like twilight.

1. Yo La Tengo - Pablo and Andrea
2. Nick Drake - Place to Be (and so many others)
3. Beck - Beautiful Way
4. Laura Viers - To The Country
5. The Magnetic Fields - 100,000 Fireflies
6. Modest Mouse - Gravity Rides Everything
7. Ola Podrida - Day at the Beach
8. Pavement - Heaven is a Truck
9. U2 - One Tree Hill (shut up, I still love this album)
10. Van Morrison - Into the Mystic
11. The Velvet Underground - Here She Comes Now
12. Yael Naim - Paris
13. Ben Folds Five - Selfless, Cold, and Composed
14. Camera Obscura - Dory Previn
15. Fruit Bats - Seaweed

Temporary boyfriendlessness sucks.
Darn you, Alaskan fishing industry.