BoldUlysses.com

I feel so untethered not writing in here. My days are so jam-packed, though… Every evening is occupied with running, working on a website or writing a post for Spannerhead. Or working on something around the house. It’s so hectic, and I feel productive, which I suppose is the draw, but… It takes its toll, especially on my diligence in writing in here. Truth be told, I’m half-hoping Spannerhead tanks so I can pull the plug and devote more time and energy to saying what needs to be said in here.

Signed up for the NCSU alumni directory today. It was almost heart-stopping to browse through the directory and scan the names of people with whom so many emotions and memories are associated:

– Kelley Glynn
– Jony Moe
– Mike Krepp
– Sarah Puffer
– Michael Mauriello
– Ed Sciomacco
– Sally Crump
– Jennifer West
– Carla and David Flowers
– Hayden Stack
– Brandy Britt
– Tim Williams
– Will Trimble
– Beau Trincia
– Justin Cooper
– Sadie Shearon
– Barry Williams
– Demitri Gudgenov
– Mirai Morita

Listening to the Weepies this morning reminded me of early marriage, 2007 in our home on Birchwood, and the dew-y freshness of it all. The naivete of declaring in Sunday School that I didn’t get angry, that I just got “frustrated,” and all the rest. Ages ago.

For all the time I spend posting ridiculous garbage on Bimmerforums, I could be recording my family’s life here. Spannerhead requires so much daily time and creative energy, and I feel like I have nothing left for here, but that’s not true; it’s really just a matter of time management. Like everything else, I suppose.

Been talking with Aaron more lately. I’m ashamed to say I’ve let our friendship languish over the years, shades of what happened when I was in college during his final year of high school and we didn’t see each other much, except that this time the distance is much greater and our respective activity levels are much higher. But while it may be more difficult for us to casually get together and play tennis and shoot the breeze like we used to, there are definitely many means of communication I can avail myself of, ones that I haven’t used, sadly.

But lately our friendship has been picking up a bit. He’s decided to get back into tinkering with cars, which naturally opens up a huge common ground for us to talk about. A couple of months ago, he bought a 2nd-generation RX-7 (a blue example of the type was his first car), fixed it up and flipped it, and subsequently purchased his dream car: a 3rd-generation RX-7.

While it’s not necessarily my dream car, it’s certainly in the top five, and it’s a car he and I have lusted after for years. He got a good deal on the car he bought, but it was in particularly poor condition, so he’s got his work cut out for him in terms of restoring it. It definitely gives us something to talk about, though. And of course, it’s not that we couldn’t (or shouldn’t) talk about other, more “weighty” things, but having a conversational point-of-entry definitely greases the wheels, so to speak.

I’ve been trying to write a bit more lately, too. Any time I find myself in the position of not having written consistently for a while and trying to pick back up, I inevitably ponder the “scope” of my journal, how long it’s lasted, the memories it contains, and so on. And between thinking about that and musings on the “resumption” of my friendship with Aaron, there’s been a convergence of sorts between the areas. That is to say, my journal does contain a wealth of memory; however, it only goes back so far, to December 2000, and there are many gaps and fits and starts. Friends like Aaron, who have known me for ages, “contain” memories of their own, and provide a link to my past just as strong as, and that reaches farther back than my journal does. It’s almost like the act of having friends fleshes us out an individuals, connects us with our past and illuminates our present through all those “remember whens” we share when we converse. There are so many details he recalls that I’ve forgotten, or never noticed about events we both witnessed, and the same is true of me for him.

Of course, friendship accomplishes many things besides just allowing us to reminisce. But for me, the recent ruminations do provide a sort of “grounding” for the idea of having “history” with someone. It’s not such an ethereal concept any more, and I realize its importance in light of my need to be tethered in time. There are few things more unsettling to me than the thought of being “weightless in time,” of losing my bearings with respect to my past (good and bad events alike), of falling off the slope I’ve climbed so far, through my 32 years of life. So among a myriad of other ways, I’m tremendously grateful for friendship in that.

by the stars in the southern hemisphere
and he walked his days under african skies.
this is the story of how we begin to remember.
this is the powerful pulsing of love in the vein.
after the dream of falling and calling your name out,
these are the roots of rhythm and the roots of rhythm remain

I’ve got a lyric, some time here at work (it’s a slow day), but nothing to write about. Well, scratch that; I’ve got plenty to write about but nothing’s springing to mind at the moment.

The lyrics are from Paul Simon’s strangely affecting “Under African Skies.” I’ve always liked the song. I love Simon’s lyrics in any context; he’s got a real flair for capturing moments and emotions with sparse collections of words that intersect the event being alluded to at oblique angles. The effect is to catch you slightly off guard, enough to want to unpack the lyrics, but they aren’t so abstract or off-putting that they drive you away. In other words, they’re accessible but profound, like good poetry.

I think a lot about how my writing tapered off somewhat after I got married, and about the brief, sporadic stints of heavy journaling I’ve had since then, and what that all means. The most obvious thing the situation reflects upon is my motivation to write in the first place. It’s not much of a stretch to make a connection between my frequent journaling in the past and my desire to meet someone I could be with. I always suppressed that connection, denied to myself that that’s why I wrote as much as I did, and tried to channel that motivation in support of subjects I really did think and care about, but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a factor at all. Fortunately, by the grace of God, I think I was able to “harness” the emotional élan that feeling of longing provided in service of more diverse topics than simply moping about being single, or posting a continual series of “sweet nothings” intended to attract a potential bride. It was buried deep down, again, to the point where I didn’t openly admit to myself it was a factor, but it certainly did “kick start” more than one philosophical or introspective essay.

And of course, once we’ve established that as a piece of the “motivational pie,” it follows that once I started dating and got married, the longing I felt was rightly satisfied in Diane, that particular emotional boost evaporated, and the net result was that my posts became less frequent.

I think there’s more to it than that, though. We’ve been married for four years now, been through a fair share of ups and downs with respect to our life situation and level of busyness, and my stints of frequent posting (most significantly the one at the end of ’08) belie the notion that the longing was a necessary component of those spates of activity.

Also, I can completely deny any connection between the frequent posting any the state of the emotional connection between Diane and me. In other words, it’s false logic to assume that because I post more since we’ve been married, the sense of longing has returned, driving some kind of need for self-expression unfulfilled by Diane. No—I am completely satisfied in her; she hears everything first, and what follows in here is no reflection whatsoever on the “state of our marriage,” or what-have-you.

More than anything, as mundane as it sounds, I honestly think it comes down to habit and practice. This has been borne out time and again throughout the roughly 10 years I’ve been blogging. Once I have some momentum under my belt, the lights come on the parts of my brain accustomed to expressing my thoughts in writing, at a certain speed, and the words just come. Simple as that. It’s incumbent upon me to keep it up.

I’ve got to start posting more often. On a whim, I reread some entries from a few years ago, and the emotion from those times in my life wasn’t the only thing that returned around the framework of the words–I remembered how invigorating it was to write, to sit at the keyboard, close my eyes and just let the words come out; to craft and arrange them, to mold and shape paragraphs and clauses so they would project the exact forms and structures I intended in my own mind… I haven’t disappeared from the online world entirely, but I didn’t realize how my recent “exile” in forums and on Twitter felt stunted in comparison with the élan of writing longer posts. Rereading the entries was the bucket of icy water that reminded me of how much I was missing by not investing in my blog.

And yet, every time I sit down to write, the immediacy of the day’s events crowds around and chokes off any hope of breaking through to something that would represent what I really want to write. As soon as I say that, though, I remember my two-month stint of furious blogging a year and a half ago, and how it took me several posts to reach the point where I felt more unencumbered–I think the same pattern applies here. So I’ll just have to stick it out.

…none of which is to say there’s something inherently less or unworthy about writing about the day’s events–those things have their place. Each function of a blog is satisfying in its own way.

For now, though, just a snapshot: I’m sitting in the darkened room of our new apartment typing away. Diane’s asleep on the bed behind me; she’s exhausted after a long day and series of nights battling insomnia. The fan makes the nightly racket on the shelf next to her. Work has been busier than usual, the dust continues to settle around our church situation and the kids grow and grow. Luke got a bike for his 6th birthday recently and we’ve been on a few bike rides. He’s getting the hang of it, slowly. Realizing he could control his own speed, to a degree, by pedaling backward was a revelation to him. He’s a cautious boy and hasn’t trundled along at any speed faster than a slow walk. He’ll loosen up in time; I’m not concerned. Penelope is more lovely every day, but needs to be potty trained, badly. Diane and I are tired of diapers and their attendant rashes and messes. It’s time.

More to come. I need this.

to let the rivers wash over me

Well, to start posting in here, more like. I’ll move my posts from LJ and Blogger over here eventually, so I can have one uninterrupted journal. For the most part, at least—there have been gaps here and there, most recently in the past six months or so. I was doing so well around the beginning of the year, too. Moving onwardly…

This is my new blog. Diane will be taking up residence on another domain, still being set up. We considered sharing a blog, but thought better of it since she’s upwardly mobile in the conservative blogosphere, and having an overtly political blog cluttered with various car-related posts and space exploration rants/meanderings by the husband wouldn’t fare well, or at least wouldn’t be taken as seriously as it would otherwise. So we’ll adopt the arrangement settled upon.

For those of you wondering about my URL and site name, it’s from an Over the Rhine song lyric:

my love is a fever
my love is a fable
my love is jazz licks
improvised by toddlers
bold Ulysses by nursery rhyme
and firelight

You can view a live performance of the song here. I love OtR like nothing else, really. We have got to see them live.