See the Garebear awake from his long slumber

Welcome to Memoirs of a Garebear. Sit back, strap yourselves in, let the magic flow over you, appreciate the majesty of it all.

I'm not going to lie to you -- this is not my first time. I used to have a blog, late last year, an exercise in daily mental masturbation. I grew to like it, almost as much as I like the other kind of masturbation, but toward the end it started to feel redundant -- I guess I should say I started to feel redundant, considering it was primarily about me and my deep thoughts and feelings, amusing anecdotes about my madcap life, etc. Plus music -- I talked about music a lot. Apropos of that, I'll tell you that I am, for maybe the thirtieth time in the last week and a half, listening to Wilco's "A Ghost Is Born" album. I've only recently come to appreciate it in its entirety. I immediately fell for two of the best songs on the album, "Hummingbird" and "Theologians," and in the course of dropping those songs onto various playlists and mixes, I kind of lost track of the rest of the album. Not so anymore, man. Gimme "Hell Is Chrome" any day. "At Least That's What You Said" -- yes, please. Fuck it, I'll take the whole album. It's good work, start to finish. That's all anyone can ask for, and more than anyone usually gets.

So where have I been lo these many months? Roughly the same place, perhaps a little less so. I'll tell you right now, I'm not digging 2009 nearly as much as I dug 2008. The year started out fine, I had a helluva fortieth birthday party, but things went pretty swiftly downhill after that. Actually, that's not entirely true, there have certainly been some notable exceptions: good times, good books, good movies, good music, a few milestones, remarkable friends, unlikely moments I'll never forget. I danced on a pole at the Bob-in. On two separate occasions. Sadly, there was only a camera present the first time. I nailed it the second time. Ask . . . well, here's where we protect the relatively innocent and leave the names out -- not everyone wants you to know they were at the Bob-in for last call on a Tuesday night. I guess you'd have to ask Gubby. He pretended he wasn't watching, but you know he was. I was good.

This will be relatively short, I'm just getting my feet wet, limbering up. What else . . . I'm still working on my book. Progress is slow, but I did good work today, so I'm happy. I've also been doing some freelance writing for the local newspaper (thanks C). I'm certainly not a natural as a journalist -- I always want to use the word "I," because of course I'm a tiny bit of a narcissist (aren't all bloggers, really? where would the worldwide internets be without us?), but unless somehow I manage to wrangle myself an actual column (like JP Devine! Oh please oh please oh please!), I'm pretty sure whoever opens the paper to read about Albion Field Days doesn't give a rat's ass what I think about it. Just the facts, man. So there's that, and I kind of like it. If you have any newsworthy events in your life, give me a shout, maybe I'll write about YOU!

Other than that, I haven't mowed my lawn in like a month and a half. I thought you might like to know that. I also sleep on the couch on my porch. Every night. What can I say, it gets me out of bed in the morning. The porch couch, not the unmowed lawn. The lawn is its own statement.

Okay, no real news, just getting it rolling, so I'm going to post this and see if it works. I'll leave you with the final two lines of a poem I stumbled upon this morning, "The Scarlet Woman" by Fenton Johnson:

"Now I can drink more gin than any man for miles around.

Gin is better than all the water in Lethe."

Until next time, bozos.