I Travel

After 5 years and 2500 posts (well, pop your cork in my general direction) it comes down to this--I'm still wandering in the selva oscura. But I'm much more fortunate than that Dante dude, as he merely had Virgil as his guide, who would speak in Latin and just confuse me, and I, instead, have got you, my loyal readers, whether you come here out of real world friendly obligation, oddly connected long distance internets voodoo involving the Mets/politics/beer/music/a belief that history needs to be made fun of on Fridays, or in search of that nude picture of Morganna the Kissing Bandit, which might not exist, and certainly doesn't here. (Go check my pay site!) And yes, I'm figuring if it's 2500 entries, it's at a minimum of 7500 parenthetical statements (promise I didn’t hire out to the folks who counted the Tea Baggger protesters in DC this weekend). Thanks for sticking with me through thick and thicker. And that's just my sentences (no, not my thinking, wise guy).

I know, as metaphors go the journey is as worn as that path you took to get far away from people using the metaphor of a journey. (That's sort of a sentence palindrome. And yes, I'm proud.) But what the heck else have these 5 years been, and if anyone wants to point to Macbeth Act V, scene v., well, that's not fair. Plus I've been here way more than an hour on this stage, and while I have surely fretted, I have barely strutted.

For to move my literary allusions into at least the 20th century (you might remember it for its hit "World Wars, I and II"), so far I've sort of been tuning my piano, as John Barth, the man who taught me I don't write fiction, put it way back in 1956: "And although my principles might change now and then--this book, remember, concerns one such change--nevertheless I always have them a-plenty, more than I can handily use, and they usually hang all in a piece, so that my life is never less logical simply for its being unorthodox. Also, I get things done, as a rule."

So float opera on, I guess. (The mixing of high and low culture is one of the copyrighted features of this blog.) It's just that we're all in this together, all los campesinos if not Los Campesinos!, country folk in a land bordered by electrons and surrounded by those who don't get it and won't get it but will often get the better of us as that's just how life is rigged these days.

So, let's soak our toes in champagne, let's dance on a lonely street. Let's kick up a cloud of dust and shake our heads to a fancy beat. Let's squish the life out of everything and cheer through a swanky ghost. Let's bathe in a cup of dreams and share in a saucy toast.*

I'll make the cocktails. When you all coming by?

As for travel, I will continue to--off this weekend to that Anderson Valley place I've written about before with my wife and in-laws who have been the damn funnest fondest fabulous family to the easily stranded me (thank you). But I have to thank all of you, too, for just putting up with all the words, all the weirds, all the ways INOTBB goes a bit everywhere, generally all at once. The advice they always give--and you know exactly what they I'm talking about, the advice-giving ones--is to focus that blog, to narrowcast, to write something like Lightbulb Collecting Liechtensteiners or Omar Minaya's Minions or Desiccating Grubs for Dinner Blogspot. Nope, you're on the whacky road with me that stops in too many places in too many podunk nowheres I hope might open up to something with a bit of kicking about and some words exerted in their defense.

Come with me, then, to where I don't know, but there we will all be, you and me and these word things we hope are things and therefore we hammer out hope into something. No matter how many times I rant like yesterday.

* most obscure reference in this post--bonus signed copy of post if you can ID it

(31 of 31 in the drive to 2500! It is accomplished! imagine Peter Gabriel's soundtrack to Last Temptation is playing!)