I cleaned my room.

I cleaned my room and it felt great. In fact I want to record the fact that I am writing this sitting at my desk. That hasn’t happened since I moved into this house. This is momentous. I have a cup of Swiss Miss on the desk next to me and also a pen holder that is actually a drill bit holder I got at D.I. My life is great.

When you clean up you find old stuff. Like your parents’ copy of The Power and the Glory and about a dozen other books you pilfered eight years ago (including Kafka’s The Trial-- that stuff is nutty). And old notebooks. Last time I went through this exercise, months ago, I found a spiral-bound steno notebook from high school I used to draw in, but it still had some empty pages so I started using them for To Do lists and provisional plans and things. (Pretty much what I use paper for is To Do lists, and pretty much I write them during sacrament meeting.) Today I found it buried beneath a stack of papers again and it was all full except for one empty page. So I tore it out along with a couple other pages with things that were still relevant to me on them, and threw the notebook away. And I know I have a worrying tendency toward nostalgia; that’s why I consciously decided I didn’t need anything in there anymore so there was no reason to hold onto it.

Still, I couldn’t keep back the slightest twinge of sadness. This thing has my handwriting in it; it has pages full of things I was thinking about and planning and worried about forgetting, many of which I actually did, eventually. It is, in its way, a record: proof that I lived and thought during the time it represents. Sometimes it’s nice for me to have proof of that. And there’s something cool about having it in this very ad hoc form, apart from my transcripts and class notes and correspondence and (neglected) journal. Looking at these artifacts of former lives, riddled with angst and uncertainty, helps me to see progress in my self-- I’m normally pretty confident that I’m now slightly less angsty and uncertain. So it’s the tiniest bit hard to let go of that tangible reminder that I actually am moving forward. But I can’t keep everything. Moving forward entails cleaning up, organizing, and throwing away. I’m okay with that. And that in itself is progress, right?

422-4636.

Last night I went to the cowboy poetry festival of Heber, Utah, and saw such luminaries as Sourdough Slim, Doris Daley, and the Sons of the San Joaquin. The BYU Philharmonic, including Annie, was there too. In jeans. We sat right next to Kory's wife. Her name is Carolyn. She's from Montana. She's cool.

The BYU Operators told me that a postman called them today to ask how to deliver a 2100-pound package to the Crabtree building. Also Fidel Castro's daughter called to tell BYU she'd be in the area in January and would like to speak at the university. So if that happens: you heard it here first.

My life is beautiful.

Nature.

Yes, I know.  I know!  The world doesn’t need any more self-reflexive blog diatribes on the excesses of information and communication, and anyway, Nature would have a hard time finding a less-qualified spokesman than yours truly.

And I like the twitters and the tumblrs and the readers and the texts and autotunes and awards shows and earbuds and the myriad twinkling accoutrements of the post-whateverist land I live alongside and choose to inhabit and which my grandfather would grumble about.  I like that stuff.  And I’m not going to say It’s Dumb or It’s Fake because mostly it’s just People, and of course most of them are dumb and most of them are fake, but that’s nothing new, and dumb people have had radio shows and written pamphlets and carved hieroglyphs and talked, I’m pretty sure, since the world’s had them in it, and you just have to love them for it.  We’re all pretty dumb to each other most of the time.

And I guess I’m just talking about wanting to remember how dumb we are, and proud and happy and insignificant and beautiful, by examining an anthill maybe, or walking at night, or smelling things.  I can see why Grandpa grumbled.  There’s a lot to miss.  There’s a lot that’s pretty unambiguously real.  And I’m not saying I want to throw my computer into the river.  Or give up TV or hamburgers.  I’m not trying to be pious.  I guess I’m just thinking a little more about balance, and about appreciating what underwrites all this.  Which ultimately is not even Nature.  But I think Nature is a little step towards it. So's People.

Baby Quails.

This is how I fall in love with Salt Lake City on a Saturday:

Drive through the Avenues to the home workshop of a violin-maker who specializes in bows. Learn about the minute differences between Siberian stallion and Argentine mare hair.

Eat meat pies, plum bars, and eclairs from Mrs. Backer’s Pastry Shop while strolling down S Temple to the Presbyterian church and the Cathedral.

Climb Ensign Peak. Look at the the whole tree-carpeted valley. Watch the airplanes take off and land. See the baby quails on the trail.

Check out the Capitol Hill Ward meetinghouse. It looks like a Disney castle.

Hang out on the ample, shady lawn of the Capitol in late afternoon.

Drive through the neighborhoods of narrow streets and steep hills and old houses, pretty as any in Boston or Seattle.

Drink a Cherry Crush.

Eat an absurdly tasty reuben at Ruth’s Diner in Emigration Canyon. 1960 Corvette in the parking lot.

Wake up; we're here.

All it took was me getting up in the morning, going running, listening to Wilco, and seeing the moms bringing their kids to school to bring tears to my eyes.  That was Friday.  Today it was the driveway in a neighborhood south of Seven Peaks with handprints and names in the walkway and "Concrete is strong.  Family is stronger."  You'd think it was that time of the month, or something.  I don't know.  There's a lot of beauty around.

Isaiah 55:2. Wipe that smirk off your face.

I've always been reluctant to get very much use out of this thing, the blog, because I'm afraid I'll just come out whiny.  Advance apologies if my fears prove well-founded.

I need to do this because I suffer from a rare disease that causes my sense of self to diminish to dangerous levels if I don't emit words.  And since my journal got stolen last month and I haven't yet begun to replace it, this is where I do my exercises.  I said I suffered from a rare disease-- I was joking, and I probably shouldn't be joking because there are probably people who really do have diseases like that.  Furthermore, it's probably abundantly clear to everyone that this disease, if we're serious about calling it that, is actually not rare at all.

I was going to write a lot this summer.  Instead so far I've just played rock and roll.  Which has its own rewards.  One of the main rewards is being in a band called Casanova Frankenstein.
Come see us play this Friday, 18 June, at 8:00 pm, at 184 E. 500 N.  With my friends The Brocks.

casanovafrank.blogspot.com

I made it home safely.

In case you are wondering what happened in the last few days of our trip, now that we've been back for a month, we just wrote about them.

sandblogeurope.blogspot.com