#32

I can't help but do one more post. I suggested we share songs and pictures and all that kind of stuff, so I thought I would take a minute to explain some of the techniques to do just that.

I'm sure you all have figured out how to do pictures since the program does it for you. But what if you want to make a picture that only pops up when you click on a certain word, like this one? It's easy. Once you've uploaded the image and that long strip of code shows up in your post, just delete the middle part—the second long string bracketed between greater-than and less-than signs. Then put the word you want to become a link right in between the remaining brackets, after the long one beginning "<a href" and before the short one that's just "</a>."

Or what if you want to make a word a link to some other website or article or song or something? Here's what you need to know:

To make a link, you have to encompass a word with two tags, one to start the link and one to close it. For the first one you type this:

<a href="http://www.coolwebaddress.com">

and fill the space in the quotation marks with whatever web address you want.
Then you write whatever words you want to be the link, and then you follow it with the closing tag: </a>. It's that easy, but you need to make sure you've made no mistakes or it won't work.

You can also add something to the first tag to make sure that the link opens in a new window when it's clicked. For this, type your link as follows:

<a href="http://www.somewhere.com" target="_blank">

Sharing music is a little more difficult because of copyright laws. Generally, the song needs to be available on the internet to listen to for free. You can't use tracks from CDs you own. But if you want to share a song from, say, Napster, all you need to do is find the link to the song itself (which can be found on the player in the little box that says "Email It." That address is the one you need to put in the tag for the link). Here is a song I would like to share with all of you. It's creepy and awesome.

If you want to know anything else, anything more complicated than that, drop me a line and I'll see what I can do.

And now, if there's nothing else, here is a list of things I wanted to share with you:

an A paper,
a song I just love,
a newspaper article that surprised me,
a crossword clue that look forward to solving,
a website that pleased me,
a new product everyone should try,
a sweet new recipe,
a compliment I received,
a tradition I am starting,
a crush I am managing,
a habit I am breaking,
a plan I am hatching,
a book I am devouring,

and for good measure, here's another song I totally dig. And one more.

A Month of Sundays

Well today is the last day of September, and looking back I see that I've done thirty posts this month. This one makes thirty-one in thirty days. Not bad, if I do say so myself.

I hope you who read (how many there are I do not know, but I like to imagine there are hundreds of you on the edges of so many seats, waiting for the next clever thing to come out of my fingers) are enjoying it. I sure enjoy writing it. It's cathartic, it's challenging, and it's fun. I like to think of it as an open letter to all my friends, people who would love to hang out if circumstances permitted, people who are in the mood for an interesting story or light philosophical discussion after work and before bed. People who care about me.

For those friends of mine keeping their own blogs: I love it. You don't know how many times a day I check to see if you've updated. If nothing else inspires you to write or rant, know that one guy will read and enjoy every word. You are making my day, and I'm rooting for you. Can you even guess how much one sentence of your original thinking touches me? The way you say something, the thoughts you think: they are worth more than all the conversations I have in a given day with strangers and lesser beings and those who don't ever seem to think at all. How, you ask? Because we're friends. Your words are valuable to me because on them hangs all the feelings between us big and small.

Why don't we all make a goal to post once a week in October? Twice a week? Every day? I keep a list of possible things to write about so I always have something to fall back on. It's nice to think I'm not losing so many ideas to being forgetful these days. How about posting some pictures—ones you took or ones you drew, I don't care which. Or maybe an A paper, as if the internet was a huge refrigerator (refrigerator: what a singularly strange word now that I think about it). Share with me a song you just love, or a newspaper article that surprised you, or a crossword clue that stumped you for a while before the moment of ecstatic realization hit, or a website that pleased you, or a new product everyone should try, or a sweet new recipe, or a compliment you received, or a tradition you are starting, or a crush you are managing, or a habit you are breaking, or a plan you are hatching, or a book you are devouring. My friend, I'll be reading every word.

Once More to the Woods

Today I end what I estimate has been nearly a decade-long drought of no camping. It's true—it's been so long since I went camping that I can't even remember when I last did it; I can only conjecture that it was around the time I graduated high school.

It has been a shameful ten years for this boy, who grew up camping almost on a monthly basis. I love all types of camping, from the state park, drive-in-with-a-cooler-and-a-piñata, picnic-table-and-tent-slab-provided affair my family enjoyed twice a year or so (spring and fall in Texas, when it isn't too blazing hot or too dang cold), to the pack-your-stuff-in, leave-no-trace, pack-your-stuff-out-again extravaganzas of my Boy Scout career. And don't forget the annual Father and Sons Camp Out—a spectacle of soda and lighter fluid and burning marshmallows¹—nor the summer camp adventures at El Rancho Cima: a week lazing around the river, crossing the dam barefoot, swinging the suspension bridge back and forth with coordinated effort, playing horseshoes, and hiking up Appetite Hill each night to the dining hall. Oh, I'll never forget that first year when we all got sicker 'n dogs and my dad and Joel's dad drove up with pizza to pull us out of our funk. And I'll never forget that last year when me and Will worked it so we didn't have to take any merit badge classes and we lazed around all day building fires and goofing off.

Oh Mother Nature, where have I been? What has kept me from thy sweet embrace?

It isn't that I haven't tried to go camping in the past years; it's just that it hasn't worked out. My only real chances have been during my already quite short trips home, and things never seemed to come together the way they should to make it a viable trip. You need the right people, and the right attitude—basically that boils down to a bunch of good friends or family members with much more ambition than is deemed reasonable. And here's the reason for that: because going camping sounds good when you say it, but when you get down to committing, to booking a spot and gathering up enough gear and planning menus and fronting the cash, your ambition wanes. You have to have a surplus, enough to get you out the door after everyone is finally ready an hour or so after go-time, after set-backs and back-outs and time-offs. But it's like running—getting out the door is the hardest part. Once you're there you can't imagine being anywhere else.

And it isn't like I haven't been outdoors. I've done my share of day hikes and stargazing, of barbequing, shiskebabing, and slow roasting. But there's something special about getting to a place near dusk, setting up camp, sitting up late around a fire, and then getting up the next morning to really see where you are for the first time—to finally get your bearings among the scattering of trees, to put images to the divots and rills merely felt under your feet the night before.

The tension has been building. I've been talking more and more about outdoorsy things in past years, from hiking up the local mountain to hitting the Appalachian Trail to biking across Europe. I've become a voracious reader of travel writing of all kinds in a subconscious (until this moment) attempt to fill the hole in my life, like itching a phantom limb. I sleep with my windows open. I've filled my Christmas list with sleeping bags and tents and boots and backpacks. But it's all talk at the end of the day, right? It's all "kissing through a handkerchief," as the venerable Dr. Seely averred in class one day.²

Well no more! In little more than an hour I set off with my local scout troop to spend a day and a night and a day in the wilderness. The dirth ends tonight in a fury of campfire cooking, stake pounding, and pole lashing. Wish me luck, my great friends!


¹Well, the years we actually made it there were filled with junk food and fire. Most years it seems one of us boys got sick and we ended up turning back halfway there to spend the night camped out in the garage. Oh, those days in the Mother Ship, reciting the Grover Boy Creed: "We're Grover Boys, and we love our momma, and we love ketchup!" Life was simple then.
²He was referring to reading Homer in any language but the original Greek, but the idea is the same.

The Result of Not Winding Down Properly After Work

I dreamed an essay just now. It was a eulogy of some sort for a colleague that no one liked, and it incorporated as part of its text an encounter with that colleague's surviving roommate or somesuch, a man I hadn't known until the death brought us into contact and who was also little worth knowing. I don't know a single word in the essay, but it had short paragraphs and one of the early ones, a section-ending paragraph it was, recorded our meeting and did some objective wondering about the man's feelings for his deceased roommate. It wasn't meant to be mean or judging or accusatory; I meant the short bit only to be an honest account or an honest conjecture, and having written it in I turned in the dream to wandering the imaginary cobbled streets of a hilly dream university (wide streets in a place faintly provincially German). Somehow the roommate read the account I had done—had the essay been published already?—and at the funeral told me he appreciated my candor; both he and I or maybe it was just he or just I were surprised that I hadn't taken the opportunity to expose his unlikeability and shade the account with personal grievances. "Hey it's no thing," I say and float back up the street without visualizing any actual funeral and I compose that encounter into the essay too, it being not-central to the essay's theme but it somehow completes the piece in a subtle and beautiful way that saturates my dream with feelings of importance and urgency, and in that moment I realize both that I am very thirsty and incredibly bored, so I wake up, decide immediately to get a drink in the bathroom, and am relieved I won't have to stay in a boring dream. But the feeling of urgency the dream gave me—I assume my body's response to doing some good writing (albeit in a dream without actual words) and not wishing to lose it—remained with me in waking, so I booted up the old computer to at least get the satisfaction of writing about writing well.

And now I'm going to hop back into my bed that smells more like me and less like fresh laundry than I would like despite frequent washing and laying down will feel new again and hopefully I can catch an hour or two of a new dream.

Only in Dreams

Ever since I had surgery in May I've been having troubling dreams. Actually I have troubling dreams all the time—mild nightmares, I'd call them, mostly involving me being naked (no, seriously)—but these are different.

In case you didn't know, I ripped my poor left ACL cleanly in two on the slopes of Brighton last March. Since then you can count the steps I've run, the jumps I've made, and the pivots I've turned all on one hand. It's been a slow six months or so, and since I put off surgery until school got out, I still have a couple months of walking to do, all the time imagining how I won't be able to pursue a pickpocket who snatches my wallet or defend myself effectively against a maniac with murder in his eyes (no really, I imagine this all the time).

So imagine my [insert emotion here] when I started having scary dreams about running and jumping. It happens once a week or so: I'll be dreaming about some situation in which I must do something considered dangerous for someone in my condition. I'll be playing tag or basketball, and my sleeping mind will flinch at the image of me doing something I've committed not to do. My mind will be yelling in vain protest at what my body is doing (aren't all scary dreams variations on this theme?¹), and I'll wake with the lingering feelings of danger and regret tripping on the heels of my relief that it wasn't real after all. Would you call these nightmares? They seem to me to be anxiety dreams, similar in every way to my fairly commonly recurring dreams about smoking or drinking or smooching girls I know I shouldn't or showering in the middle of a crowded room—things I wouldn't normally do but find myself doing against my better judgment when the ego has gone to bed.²

But in good news, last night I dreamt I broke into a run and it felt great and there was no moment of horror. I attribute this to the fact that last Saturday, after cleaning the church and lying on the gym floor and agreeing with Joey that I do have something in common with Dewey Finn, I did one wild lap around the place when Joey and Callan declared a brief dodge ball war on me. "I'm running!" I shouted in real life, first in disbelief and with a tinge of the dreamy fear of past nights; "Look at me—I'm running!" I repeated in shock and joy as my left leg didn't cry out in pain or weakness for the first time since March 9^th. It was one of those moments when my own voice surprised me—I hadn't registered as much emotion in seeing the words on the chalkboard in my mind as I heard in my voice when they came out of my mouth.

It is a welcome surprise.

¹Scary movies as well. We all silently or vocally wish the actors to do something different—to not wander into those scary woods, to not turn their backs on that doorway, to not trip every time they run—but of course they don't respond to our wishes. Actually, for the first few weeks after I hurt my knee I would have these odd moments of disconnection when a movie's protagonist jumped up out of a chair or nimbly hopped over a puddle with no thought or precaution for their left knee. How much do we project ourselves into movies we see?
²Should I be proud or ashamed?

Autumn

Today is the first day of autumn, and, coincidentally, it is also Callan's birthday. Callan, as you may know, is my friend Joey's four-year-old son. I think he likes me, because whenever I'm around he seems to be very excited (he can't be that way all the time, can he?), and he asks me tons of questions beginning with, "Hey Grover!"

Last week we were all at Walmart together and Callan decided to shop with me rather than his parents. As we walked around the store looking for an ironing board and some Snack Packs, I asked him, "Callan, who am I?" He squirmed the way kids do when they sense you are patronizing them. "I'm not your father and I'm not your brother," I prodded, interested to see if Callan would classify me as an uncle or some other, lesser relative.

"You're—uh, you're my friend," said he.

And there you have it; I was schooled by a three-year-old. Of all the things I was expecting, "friend" was the last, but when I think about it, it really was the right answer. As far as I know, I was the only person Callan personally invited to his house today for cake and ice cream (we won't count Eric, whom we ran into at Walmart, because Callan didn't know who he was). We must really be friends.

Here's to autumn, my favorite season, the one in which newly cold air, heavy with memories, finds your skin at the wrists and ankles and collar—wherever there is a seam—awakening both bitter regret and sweet recollection. And here's to friendships shared with three-year-olds on up, one thing that should never become merely a memory. To all my friends: I love you.

The Franklin Chronicle

I thought I should let you know about The Franklin Chronicle before tomorrow, seeing how I plan on writing a post that begins with the line, "Today is the first day of autumn, and, coincidentally, it is also Callan's birthday." You'll need to know who Callan is for it all to make sense.

Callan is my friend Joey's soon-to-be-four-year-old son. He also has a nine-ish-month-old son named Nolan. He is married to Melissa, and together they make up the Franklin family. They keep a blog, mostly for their extended family's sake, but if you like pictures of cute children and entries that you might someday read in a revised form in a magazine or something, then it could be for you also.

A little history: Joey and I had a literature class together a few years back (who was it, Joey—Aaron Eastley?). We were both new English majors, and we became acquinted in the course of class discussions and group work. Then there was a semester or so in which we didn't see each other, which was fine because we weren't actually friends, but during that semester apparently we both took creative writing classes and fell in love with creative nonfiction (personal essays and the like). Then one day we ran into each other in the student center. I said, "Hey man, don't we know each other from somewhere?" and Joey said, "Sure, we had that one class together."

"Oh yeah. How's it going with you?"

"Oh, I'm about to leave with my wife and son to teach English in Japan for a year. I fell in love with a thing called the personal essay and now I've joined the honors program in hopes of doing a creative thesis of personal essays with Pat Madden as my faculty advisor. How about you?"

"Oh, I just lost the student body presidential elections¹ and was thinking about joining the honors program as well, plus I took creative writing from Pat Madden and also fell in love with the personal essay. In fact, your idea of doing essays as a thesis is the best idea I've ever heard. Excuse me." And with that, I went to the honors office to sign up. I should probably say about now that I owe everything to Joey and Pat Madden. I owe everything to Joey and Pat Madden.

But it gets better: a year later Joey got back and applied to be a Writing Fellow (a special kind of writing tutor). I remember finding out about it when Joey and I ran into each other someplace just after he got back ("Hey man, don't we know each other from somewhere?), and I also remember sitting in the office, talking to some coworkers, warning them about this creepy twin I had: "No seriously guys, this guy served a mission in Japan; I served in Korea. We're both English majors, both honors students, both creative writers, both doing a thesis of personal essays with Pat Madden, and now we're both Writing Fellows. I think he's trying to steal my life."

And now we're both studying creative nonfiction at Ohio University. Of course, we have things not in common (I seem to be missing a wife and two kids, for instance), and Joey may owe me just as much as I owe him. But who's counting? (No really, I hope he isn't counting, because all the rides he's given me since we got to Athens are adding up.)

This morning we were taking our turn cleaning up the church, and when we were done we were chilling in the gym while Mel practiced the organ. Joey had shown up at my house around nine, woken me up by honking a bunch, and here we were—me in what I slept in (which was what I had worn the day before), hair tangled, teeth unbrushed, still in a stupor lingering from my last dream; Joey seemingly wide awake, dressed, his family dressed (no small order, I understand), and he even had the energy after cleaning the church to play soccer with Callan. I on the other hand had opted to lay on the floor. As we were laughing about something I looked up at him and couldn't help but remark, "Joey, some days I feel like your no good bachelor friend who refuses to settle down and be responsible."

Indeed, for all our similarities, we are constantly being reminded of how different our lives are. You can find out for yourself just how different by reading his blog at www.franklinchronicle.blogspot.com.

¹Of all the *ahem* mistakes I've made, it's hard to believe this is one of them. And it's hard to believe we lost when lavender was our campaign color, when we were an English and a dance major taking on a phalanx of boring poli-sci business gurus, and when this was our campaign commercial. Nothing in my life has the power to so fill me with such embarassment (those sideburns!) and such pride (it's so dang good!) simultaneously as this.