I'll admit it. I went through a Charles Bukowski phase. I stumbled upon him in high school, maybe around sophomore year when I was feeling especially "poetry is for the people"-y and would cruise Border's Books until closing time searching for collections with odd titles. I bought The Last Night Of The Earth Poems immediately, and a year later received Love is a Mad Dog From Hell for Christmas.

These books were my bibles, for an embarrassing time period. I brought them with me to classes. I used them as examples of good writing for our school's literary magazine workshops. Last Night of the Earth came with me on the Thespian camping trip; late at night, after staring at the campfire for too long, a few friends and I snuck off into the woods with a flashlight and found a delightfully ghostly cave. We passed that book around and read from it, our faces glowing whitely into the night as we whispered poetic verse concerning the natures of whores and beer.

"Isn't Bukowski awesome?" I probably said. "Isn't this what it's all about?"

All this being said, there's simply nothing more hilarious than hearing Garrison Keillor read a poem by Charles Bukowski on the Writer's Almanac program.

My parents were never much for unasked-for advice, but one thing they did reiterate throughout my life was "if you can't live with the one you love, love the one you're with." This seemed pretty solid. Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young usually know what they're talking about, and nothing more reasonable than when it's sung in harmony. "Besides," I decided in high school, "I can make out with just about anyone."

Gone Again

I don't know if that was every really true, but time passes and things change. You start to want to make out with very specific, very awesome people: who clean the apartment with you and who'd rather learn how to paint with acrylics or talk about all the words that begin with "qu" than watch The Simpsons. Specific people, who own five dictionaries, and have very nice lips.

Wise advice be damned!

We have this system we're working out. The system involves a combination of his car, the Greyhound, Amtrak, Fung Wah, Metro North, and three-day weekends. I'm hoping it's the kind of thing you get used to. I'm hoping CSNY were wrong.

The Velvet Underground - I Found a Reason

If you already listen to Theory of Everything, skip to tomorrow's post - if not, download and listen to Benjamen Walker's latest episode, American Exceptionalism. You'll laugh, you'll cry. And apparently, if you write Dennis Madalone, you'll get a free t-shirt.

If I didn't have an annoying sense of right and wrong, I would post the coolest story ever right now. It involves my job, and a famous person (layman encounter with famous person = story). There are all sorts of amusing, quirky details I could have thrown in, twists of fate, quotes, etc. The word "verisimilitude" would have been incorporated.

But to feel right about writing about it, I'd have to be so general as to make the whole thing completely absurd. I decided not to waste anyone's time.

Anyway. I thought I should let you know. Now we can move on to what this post is actually about: Johnny Cash, Bob Dylan, and Elvis Presley. Three greatest men of all time? Discuss.

A couple of weeks ago, I got an email from my dad.

Also, don't consider me too dad-esque, but I got you something that would give me a bit of piece of mind if you are willing to take it. It's an emergency escape ladder. It fits in a box about 2' x 8" x 8." You keep it in your bedroom, in case of fire and you can't get out down the stairs, you open a window, it hooks on the window sill, you pull a cord and a 2 story ladder rolls out allowing you to climb down to safety.

An emergency escape ladder!

I pictured my apartment filling with smoke, flames shooting out of the roof, stereotypical firemen holding a trampoline under my bedroom window. "Don't worry, I've got it covered!" I'd shout down to them, pulling the emergency escape ladder out of its box and shaking it out of the window. Down it would tumble. Maybe it'd get caught on itself after the first story, and I'd have to whack it against the burning house until it untangled itself. "All good!" I'd cry, clambering to safety like some sticky spiderman.

Everyone would applaud.

Or be weirded out.

Everyone would react!

So the fantasy went, in far-away fantasy land. I chortled to myself merrily and chucked the emergency escape ladder into the depths of my bedroom closet, on top of the red sneakers I never wear. "See you never," I said to it.

So, of course, here's the thing.

I live with two other people. In the past week, the apartment has filled with smoke twice (sometimes toxic!), and Michael has once valiantly beat down a firey flame with his baseball hat. Unsurprisingly, the problems all stem from our electric stove. No one seems to be able to tell when it's on, or which part of it is a threat to our lives. Our stove now has only two functioning burners, and one of them has a skull of death taped to the knob to remind us to never turn it on again.

Yesterday I opened my closet door to remind myself that the emergency escape ladder was still there. I stared at it for a while.

If you live in Washington DC, Virginia, West Virginia, Ohio, Wisconsin, Minnesota, North Dakota, Montana or Michigan, perhaps you've already seen them. Two MobileBooths are touring the country, collecting stories and interviews from anyone who'd like to give them.

Image courtesy StoryCorps Flikr gallery

This is one of those posts I've been meaning to do for a long time to do it justice, and wound up waiting until it was a moot point. StoryCorps set up its Grand Central Terminal booth in October of 2003, and has been doing its MobileBooths thing since late May - and they're truckin'. A lot of ground has been covered in four months.

So what is this crazy thing, and why is it being funded?

It's the oral historian's birthday pony."StoryCorps is a national project to instruct and inspire Americans to record one another's stories in sound." You go in, you bring Aunt Tilly, you sit in front of the mics and ask her about how she ruined her sister's wedding or met her best friend, and the interview is recorded. You receive a copy of the interview on CD, and have the option of archiving it at the Library of Congress. StoryCorps is effectively building a record of our culture and time.

We've modeled StoryCorps - in spirit and in scope - after the Works Progress Administration (WPA) of the 1930s, through which oral-history interviews with everyday Americans across the country were recorded. These recordings remain the single most important collection of American voices gathered to date. We hope that StoryCorps will build and expand on that work, becoming a WPA for the 21st Century.

You can see if your area will be visited by this shiny silver orb of oral history here. If you're not on the list yet, or if you missed out on all the awesome historic action (the best kind of action) you can do it yourself and even rent the necessary equipment from their website.

It's projects like these that, even with the allure of Canada and health benefits, allow me to like my country a little bit.

"Well," Michael shrugged as we left the Museum of Fine Arts, "at least now you can say that you tripped and fell on a piece of 15th century furniture."

Brendan mentioned that he knows he's getting older because he's using the word "career" a lot. I can kind of relate to this: I know I'm getting older because I can't stand the music my sixteen year-old neighbor blasts from her bedroom. Every night I fantasize of the enlightenment I could bring her.

"Excuse me," I'd say, feathers plumed and glorious, "excuse me, neighbor-girl? I'm not sure what newfangled Linkin Park you kids claim to be into these days, but let me assure you, it's not actually what you like. And what are you doing listening to "Boulevard of Broken Dreams"? Have you ever even heard Dookie?"

On an especially grown-up day, I'd even be tempted to explain to her that we adults turn the sound off our instant messenger applications.

But seriously. It's under "preferences," I'll show you.

Michael and I have this way of getting ourselves into absurd, miserable situations. We go out, we have a great time and traipse all over a city or an island or something, but somehow our return home is a mysterious twilight zone adventure, involving life threatening situations, blood-sucking parasites, surreal landscapes or total boredom - sometimes a tossed salad of a few of these. We wind up okay in the end, and I guess we'll have great stories to tell someone, someday. But for now, I'd just like to say I'm happy to be warm in bed.

Five hours into our trip, I think I went clinically insane. "OHmigod, ohmigod, I'm so antsy, Michael whatshouldIdo?"

"You could organize all of my pennies by year." He was probably joking.

Girl, uninterrupted

It wasn't just me. Shortly thereafter, Michael insisted the answer to every question was "a million dollars." We were missing exits and not noticing, and we were turning around when we were going the right way. But it made no difference. Everything looked the same. Drive, drive, drive. Motorcycles cut in front of us and a few miles later we saw them off the road, a handle wedged through a tree trunk. Then the storm began. Lightening flickered around us and trees loomed, we hydroplaned and hunched forward, staring at the tail lights in front of us as if they were our last hope.

It was a pretty bad storm.

It took us over seven hours to get back to Boston, and we'd spent five hours the day before leaving it. The cabin fever should have been expected. The danger from the weather was there. But the really weird thing about our trip home was something undescribable; there was something in the air. We could both feel it, and were creeped out by its presence, searching the coal sky for a hint of sunshine - some clue to normalcy, some sign that time was passing and that at some point we would be home again.

I've been feeling pretty homesick lately. It began innocently: missing my family, missing my friends, missing ten thousand lakes. It's hard to be away from home for so long. But this week it graduated to missing my other home of the past four years - Bard.

"I've been thinking," I quipped to Nick at work today, "what if I just emailed one of my professors and asked her if she needed any help with grading papers or something? I think that would be a lot of fun, you know? I could do first year seminar stuff or something."

Nick stared. "What? Why would you do that?"

"You know, just to like, maintain that relationship and connection."

"What?"

"I could totally do that. I mean, maybe she wouldn't be interested, I'm just some nobody graduate working in Boston, but, you know, maybe it'd be helpful - or I could just give her my email address, and tell her that if any students had any questions about life after Bard or anything like that they could - "

"Adrianne. You won't have time for all this."

"No, totally, I'll - "

"Grading papers?" Nick pointed out that I'd just voiced concerns over the amount of time we'd have to edit our show together. How we'd just discussed that we barely had time to read, let alone create radio programs. How our lives and brainstuffs had been effectively consumed by jobs and relationships and getting at least six hours of sleep - you know, life. It'd taken over.

But I don't know what to do about this incessant longing. A few nights ago I woke up from a dream in which I'd been in Bard's campus center, sitting in the sunlight with a group of people I'd never bothered to meet, and we all realized we'd secretly admired each other from afar. We decided we'd be friends from now on. On the lawn in front of us, the entire campus was contradancing, and they spilled in and out of the room in beautiful circles.

We went to go see The March of the Penguins on Sunday. It was a nice, lazy afternoon spent in the Boston Common, followed by a nice, lazy meandering over to the theater, followed by a slow, enjoyable walk back to the middle of the Common where Shakespeare in the Park was beginning its Hamlet show. Somehow, all of the timings worked out so that we never waited for anything longer than ten minutes, even though we wouldn't have cared if we'd had to.

As if this weren't enough for my mood, it turns out that baby penguins are the cutest things in the world.

The guy next to me - who looked like he might either be an accountant or a professor - thought so too. Any time something adorable happened, he cooed in delight. This meant he was cooing for the majority of the film.

You can check out National Geographic's fancy flash website for the movie here.

When I told a boss of mine at work that I couldn't stay too late the next day because I was picking my boyfriend up at the airport, he threw his hands in the air. "Hooray, Adrianne won't be lonely any more!"

"Hooray!" I parroted, "Adrianne won't be lonely any more!"

It's nice having Michael back. That was to be expected. What I didn't count on, however, was how nice it would be to have our old restaurants back. We'd discovered a diner across the street, for example, that has the most amazing challah french toast - thick and egg-y and sprinkled with soft powdered sugar, with a foamy pat of melted butter in the center. I don't even like french toast very much, and I'd kill a man for a plate of that stuff. We'd order it with real maple syrup and small glasses of orange juice, after rolling out of bed around noon on a weekend morning, our hair still wet from the shower; it was a pretty nice tradition. There's also a thai restaurant near Davis Square called "Sugar and Spice" where we have our usual of red curry, frozen thai tea, and vegetable dumplings. And a Greek place within walking distance with cheap, fresh gyros and baklava unlike any you have ever seen.

I hadn't gone to any of these places while Michael was in California. I couldn't really imagine going to them without him. I pictured myself ordering the things we always ordered, with a magazine or book at my side so I wouldn't look awkward at a table by myself - and there didn't seem to be much point.

But now he's here, and we watched Star Wars, and everything is delicious.

My roommate and I share a lot of things in common. The same God, for example - we keep meaning to find a Unitarian church near us and to attend it some lazy Sunday afternoon, but sleep and errands keep getting in the way. ("God dammit," I sighed to her in the supermarket a few days ago, "Maria, we forgot about the Lord again." "We keep doing that," she shrugged. The man by the beans looked alarmed.) We went to the same high school. The other night we watched Cheaters on television for the first - and presumably, last - time, and laughed at the cameramen accidentally filming each other while they chased a culprit down the street. "Dude, who's that other guy running with the boyfriend?" Oh. Right. This is late-night television. (In other news, apparently the host of Cheaters has been stabbed by an angry reality-show victim before, on camera. Neat!)

After we'd gone to sleep that night, a storm started; and when the thunder nearly hit our apartment (dude it so totally did), we both bolted out of our rooms in a panic and froze in the hallway. It was quite the storm. Also, I might have screamed at some point. Maybe more than one point. It was quite the storm.

Anyway, I'm not sure if we were both embarrassed to be afraid of a thunderstorm or not, but regardless of concealed vulnerabilities we turned on the lights and went back into the living room until the death rattles stopped. This was . . . nice. Having another person around can really make you feel braver. If I'd been living alone, I probably would have hid under my covers with my iPod softly crooning The Beatles into my jittery ears and be forced to delude myself into thinking that this was how adults handled things.

Point being, Maria has a blog now.