Open Letter #1.

Dear New York:

It's been a while since we had a real conversation, hasn't it? Last time we talked I don't really think it ended well, and we both decided to give it some time-a few months, if my memory recollects correctly, and until the year's end to be specific-and then revisit this relationship and see how things were working.

At the time, New York, I came to you like a lapsed Catholic, only seeking solace in confession when things were going wrong. I would pound the pavement of your stone heart and beg for something, anything, to give, for a handhold or a foothold or just the opportunity for one night to fall asleep with a peace in my heart and in my head.

I was told I shouldn't openly write about or discuss how you were kicking my ass, New York. That it, that my search for some sort of truth or lesson in the experiences I was having, was making me look bad. I only bring this up (I didn't care then and I care less now) because there was talk, whispered hushes that we'd engage in particularly when I was drunk and sad, feeling lost and adrift in a sea of lights and movement that neither welcomed me nor rejected me but rather, as though in full awareness of my life's biggest fear, acted with utter apathy towards my existence, of us parting ways for good. You and I had decidedly amicably and with little fanfare that, at the end of 2009, if we couldn't make this twisted, fucked-up relationship that vacillates from love to hate and back 'round again work, I was going to cut my losses and leave. You'd get to keep what was rightfully yours-namely, everything (though what I didn't tell you then and I hesitate to even tell you now is that you weren't at all aware you'd recently taken ownership of my heart, though I'm willing to bet the stars in my eyes give that game away), and I'd go-well, hell, we never got that far, did we? I'm a runner, as in I like to be able to, and an escape artist of sorts, and I like my opt-outs and my clauses and I've become adapt at skirting out of parties with a "I just need to...I'll be right back" only to retreat to safe grounds of my choosing.

With you, New York, there is no safe ground, and nothing's easy. Being in a relationship with you is fucked up and sado-masochistic in a way, but not without its rewards. I used to swear by the Atlanta skyline at night (particularly when driving into the city with Outkast playing), but in 5 months yours has won me over.

In 5 months, New York, I've lived a lifetime of adventures, good and bad. And when, after meeting a friend/soon-to-be vlog partner for drinks in Brooklyn this week, I hailed a car to take me back to Astoria. When the driver somehow thought "Astoria" meant "Babycakes" and I ended up deep in Manhattan (cough cough WRONG WAY cough), I slammed my palm against the window and sighed, heavily, "I just fucking want to be home."

I only bring this up because today is my last day in the apartment which has acted as harbor for me for the entirety of our time together, New York, and not for the reasons I'd ever thought. I'm moving, yes, but just down the road-you see, I find Astoria agreeable to me. Yes, New York, it's where I feel like home.


Home. I've lived a nomadic fucking life, New York (one of my favorite Ani Difranco quotes: "I don't keep much stuff around/I value my portability"), and I have to ask:

who the fuck are you to wrap yourself around my brain and my heart and suddenly, without me even knowing, become my definition of "home"?


You've taught me gratitude, New York, in our 5 months together. So much has happened, so much magic and wonder and fucked-up shit and beauty and did I say magic already because magic. You've taught me some debts-like what I owe all those who opened their lives to me-will never be repaid simply because they can't be, there's no currency, tangible or not, in the world that can come close to functioning on that level.

In the past 5 months, I've achieved successes I never thought possible, and felt myself dropped to levels that, though I would love to never again reach, I know I'll approach again. I was never one to wax poetic on a city, New York, but I can do nothing but credit you for the good and the bad. For the rise and the fall, and the rise again. I moved from feeling like everything was crumbling around me in Atlanta to a couch in Queens through the grace of friends, and that one simple act has taught me the definition of "friendship". And now? Now my life just keeps going...and growing.

Between my freelance work and my full-time work, New York...I've clawed, tooth and nail, and I feel like I'm on something. The cusp of something. And I know we'll fight again. But, New York, as I pack the last of my stuff for a move I never dared to dream could happen, namely one that wasn't me leaving you for good? I just have to offer you up a word of thanks. I know now I can never conquer you, but tiny victories inside your boundaries are possible on a daily basis. This is my last day on 24th Ave, New York. And god, what a beautiful, humbling, unexpected experience it's been. And I know there's more.

Fuck you, New York. I love you. And thank you.

Love,

-Russ
Continued...

Last day of the Farewell Tour (the future of the future)

Years ago:

I remember feeling young, free and so damn alive, driving I-85 into the bright lights of Atlanta listening to Outkast's "Cruisin' in the ATL" album interlude, having those four words (ok, three words and one abbreviation) speak to me like words dripping from the God of the Wasted, the Wild and the Unforgettable.

I couldn't yet legally buy alcohol but I was city-drunk, on possibilities, on potential, on hope and on reckless abandon.

(Strange disclosure to let the record show, vol 1 of what is sure to be many: I once made out with my improv teacher, a woman then about 20+ years my senior, on the top of the Equitable building.)

At the time, it-all of it, those cars those lights- felt like something that no one outside of this city would ever understand. 

And I possessed that and turned it into something. Whether that something has legs, wheels or wings-well, that's about to be tested, now, isn't it?

Bye, Atlanta. You ate some of my dreams and gave me new ones.

I don't believe in long goodbyes, I don't believe in goodbyes at all, actually. But I feel I'd be remiss without taking a second to acknowledge the give-and-take in the relationship we've had for the past 26 years.  

You gave me an almost ridiculous love for hip-hop and took my faith in the world to naturally right itself. You took my naive and impassioned love for theater and replaced it with the fledgling kernels of undying, endless self-reliance.

(also, for the record, ATL? You pumped like 8 million dollars into a PR campaign I could've improved in my sleep, but, as Tupac said, I ain't mad atcha. Wait, this is about you, isn't it, Hotlanta? I should quote a southern rapper. As such, insert all of T.I.'s "Dead and Gone" here.)

You told me there were things that would never happen, things I'd never be able to do and never be able to know, as long as I was contained within your walls, and then you offered me the opportunity to make my own path.

I'll see you again, I'm sure.

Continued...

What my life is worth (last days in Atlanta)

I feel like I have a massive, mad amount of catching up to do, in terms with chronicling the Amazing Adventures Of Russ As He Moves To The North (TM). Fact of the matter is, though, I feel less "amazing" at the present moment (cue a Kanye West rant from his VH-1 "Storytellers": "Russell Stovers-AMAZING. Russ Marshalek-AMAZING. Russ, you know that company that makes the stuffed animals you buy at the greeting card stores? Are they not amazing?") than I do "in stasis". Things feel weird , because every activity I engage in in Atlanta is the "last". The "last" time I'll ever go to Your (mine?) Dekalb Farmers Market, aka the Greatest Damn Place On Earth. The "last" time I'll ever walk to the Decatur square and get angry about all the happy people. The last time I'll ever say "oh, dear, this is the last time I'm..." And really, what good does any of that serve? Basically, my brain is fabricating nostalgia at this point. "Hey, remember the time I ran into the Indigo Girls while I was shopping for coffee at Target?" No, because that didn't happen. I've run into an Indigo Girl ONCE in my entire time in Decatur (a city that they, like, own, or something. Shhhh. I'm trying to tell you something 'bout my life.). My "getting sassed by Michael Stipe" quotient is like eight times that, and Stipe lives in, like, an underground cave carved to resemble an independent coffee shop somewhere below the 40 Watt in Athens, GA, right?

Right...

Anyway, things feel weird. I'm four days from landing in LaGuardia, hopefully on-time, maybe even early (yeah, right, flying out of Atlanta's Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport is like actually attempting to coherently make your way through all of Roberto Bolano's 2666: essentially, have fun with that and call me when it's over). My entire life (six boxes of books and four of clothes) has, thanks to the child-like wondrous unicorn magic of UPS,been assigned a monetary value.



My life is officially worth $177 dollars.

I think I spent that much on the high-gravity beers that I consumed far, far too many of at my going away party...which, um, you can read about here. Basically it looked like this

only plus or minus about another 20 people throughout the course of the evening, and me seriously embarrassing myself only thrice or four times. Oh, and not all squished up due to Blogger's size restrictions. That would have sucked, huh? 

(It's flattering, though, that every person I can point to in the peripheral of that photo was there for me. I mean, that's what I *think*. Some of my friends may have just been like "ooooh crap that's right Russ's thing is here....ooooooh we better say hiiiii.......dammit he saw us" etc.)

 

"So Russ: your life is en-route to Queens via UPS, you've had a going-away party where you basically consumed your body weight and your bank account in alcohol AND there's four days left of your time in Atlanta, what are you going to do now?"

Well, first I'mma watch Twilight. And I did. And oh, god, it was bad.

(For the record, that whole "dazzling" vampire-in-the-sun-glittering bit was WAY less impressive than it should've been. Less "dazzling", more "I think Henrietta in styling used too much body glitter on R Patz".

Also, the acting. Oh, god, the acting. There's more sexual tension in a nursing home on shuffle board day than there was between Edward and Bella.)

And second? I'm going to see one of my favorite Atlanta bands, Tealights, on Wednesday. I wrote a brief bit about that on Resonator. You should read it. There's a song there, too, It's incredibly pretty and about traveling and I am avoiding at all costs applying it to my (worth $177!) life because that would just end with me being stupidly emotional.

Too late?

Four days left and counting.
Continued...

The Old Apartment

My very first girlfriend, in 10th grade(I know, right, I was a slow bloomer but I, um, flowered, or rather, deflowered, quickly...and...often? Oh, god, very veiled reference to me being a teenage slut), was a huge fan of The Barenaked Ladies. Before you go rolling your eyes at me for ever having been involved with someone possessing such mainstream oriented rock tastes, know a couple of things:

1) I really like Fleetwood Mac. So much so that I call them "Tha Fleet" both affectionately and with reverence.

2) I really, really like u2. So much so that I call them "Tha Fleet" both affectionately and with reverence. Also I really still am convinced that I can grow up one day to be Bono.

(HELLO HELLO! See, that's me practicing to be Bono.)

Besides, this was right as the Barenaked Ladies' Rock Spectacle live album was just starting to get a push, mainly on heels of that one single on there about the fat dude from Animal Collective going belly-up at a Chinese buffet, what was it called...oh, yeah, "Brian Wilson".

Anyway, Barenaked Ladies were coming to Atlanta on tour right around the time of Miss M's birthday, and so I thought, like the good puppy dog boyfriend I was at the time, I'd get tickets for us to go see them. The morning of the ticket on-sale date, I went to my local Ticketbastard affiliate (aka the grocery store across the street from the trailer park, excuse me, mobile home community) and proceeded to ask the woman behind the customer service desk for two tickets to the Barenaked Ladies.

Her mouth dropped. "Son, what you wanna see?" she asked me.

"Um, the Barenaked Ladies. Two tickets, please, to the Bare.."

I couldn't finish. She was laughing so hard tears were streaming down her face. "Y'all be wantin' to see some buttnekkid women? Charlene, Charlene get outta the office and come out here, this kid wants tickets to see some buttnekkid women!"

Needless to say, Charlene came out and also marveled at the fact that I was apparently willing to pay $25 plus service charge for tickets to see some, ahem, unclothed members of the female persuasion. They laughed. They hooted. They hollered. They slapped various parts of their very large bodies and chuckled 'til we were all red-faced. Make no mistake, though, I was not amused.

(I was also probably wearing an Indigo Girls t-shirt at the time, which makes things all the worse, always. )

The show was sold out anyway.

All of this is a roundabout way of introducing the fact that, a week and a day prior to relocating from Atlanta to New York (you know, the place they make the salsa), there are a couple of photos from my Flickr account that I need, for my own emotional sanity and mental house-keeping, to put here and caption.

Soundtracked, appropriately, by...

....the Barenaked Ladies' song "The Old Apartment"

The Old Apartment (Live Album Version) - BARENAKED LADIES

As we were cleaning out the industrial, converted-icehouse studio that had held our lives for the past 2/12 years, for me, this song kept playing in my head. A friend/excellent photographer and I recently went back to Icehouse take photos of me (everyone needs professional-quality Facebook photos, yes?), and it started up again. Probably because, like the song's narrator details, the location of past-home holds a certain romance for all the trials, tribulation and heartbreak contained therein. "Broke into the old apartment/this is where we used to live", and all that.

(SHUT UP IT'S DEEP AND MEANINGFUL RIGHT NOW TO ME)

And, despite the mom-jam status that Barenaked Ladies have, well, the song's not leaving my head any time soon.

Thing 1 and Thing 2, respectively (aka the reason for this post, aka documents submitted for your review regarding what once was):


Thing 1



A living-room dumpster scene made with all the Ikea furniture that didn't go with us. That lamp, man, if I could tell you how far that lamp has traveled with me...it's heartbreak, it's change, it's art. I call it "Merriweather Post Pavilion".

Thing 2



This, indeed, is the old apartment. Taken at 10am on the 27th of Feb, 2009. I then shut that door for the last time.

(get it, it's a metaphor?)


In the words of the Barenaked Ladies:
Only memories, fading memories
Blending into dull tableaux

It's all different from here.
Continued...

The night of the eggplant parm

In the past few days, I have moved. Vacated one life and am now in a holding pattern until the next begins. Scary times strange steps and a lot of the new Yeah Yeah Yeahs record holding my hand in a way the first one didn't but the last one more than did.

This is where I'd post a picture of the page from my old black spiral Mead notebook on which I scrawled, in landscape orientation (that's a little page layout humor, yo!), "I DON'T EVEN KNOW WHAT IT'S LIKE NOT TO GO BACK TO YOU. NO MYSTERIES.", but I got freaked out living in a moment between past and the future like that Kate Bush song says and deleted my entire old Flickr account the other night, so that picture's long fucking gone.

I don't think I have the emotional or mental reserves at the present moment to get to anything major. Too tired. Too hung over. Too much of one thing and not enough of another, with all of that being some sort of obnoxiously vague metaphor for something. I'm reaching here, people.

Rather than have this sound like a bad LiveJournal...

...I'll give a big "thank you" to the super-awesome Megan "SuperBadass" Volpert and the restorative powers of her eggplant parmesan for making the tail end of a really, really long set of days something that will eventually inspire a self-referential prose piece entirely composed as a parenthetical aside and called "(Had never really had eggplant parm before but even if I had 'twould not compare, nor shine as bright nor flicker like the firefly's tail glistening against that reflective surface, to this incredible creation of magic and wonder and OMFG IT WAS GOOD Y'ALL)".

(Side-note about parenthetical asides: an ill-executed one will fucking keep me up at night. While reading an advance copy of Jennifer Egan's The Keep, I came across a passage which was prefaced by an open parenthesis...that was never closed. Ever. Now, granted, that's why Advance Reading Copies, or ARCs in the stupid world of stupid publishing that I love so stupidly with all my stupid heart and it makes me so angry and frustrated and I even love that and anyway I digress, have gigantic slappy copy all over them reading "THIS IS AN UNFINISHED COPY. UNFINISHED. IT MEANS NOT DONE. NO ONE HAS PROOFED THIS EXCEPT FOR THE INTERN, AND WE FIRED HER THOUGH REALLY WE SHOULDN'T HAVE SINCE SHE WORKS FOR FREE AND AS SUCH IF WE POPULATED ALL OF THE PUBLISHING HOUSES JUST WITH UNPAID INTERNS WE COULD SAVE PUBLISHING"-because, um, they've not been proofed. So typos happen. Words are misspelled. The ARC I have of the forthcoming English translation of the late Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire has a bunch of oddly typeset underscores prefacing random words. But when a parenthesis isn't closed? How is someone raised on a diet of modern and post-modern lit and literary criticism NOT supposed to just ASSUME the entire book, from the open parenthesis on, ad infinitum, doesn't take place as an aside? Seriously, I say this with as much calmness as I can muster when even thinking about it makes my hands shake and brow sweat again, the unclosed parenthesis in the ARC of The Keep kept me up all night, tossing and turning. To assuage my fears, I had to both reassure myself that the next time a closed parenthesis appeared it would, in turn, close the initial open one also AND hunt down a finished copy in a Borders later to prove to my obsessive-compulsive brain that, in fact, the entire book actually did happen in real-time and not as some digression.)

In the fridge right now sits this:



A tiny bit of left-over love from the night of the eggplant parm. A little more of that, and a little more thought-gathering, and I'll be ready to, erm, write down the bones? I think after this year I'll never be allowed to say that again.
Continued...

The reconnaissance mission

So, I'm sitting alone in Wordsmiths, drinking my first cup of coffee of the day in total solitude and listening to the new (read as: oh god so awful in some parts) U2 album, for the last time. I mean, it's not my last cup of coffee-of the day or ever, god no-and I'm far too much of a masochist and a Bonoist to not listen to No Line On The Horizon again (despite its title being the universal statement for "this party's over, folks"). No, this is my last day at Wordsmiths as Marketing/PR director, and in a month I'm gone from Atlanta, too. And I still haven't found a job. Like, I can hear my mom's voice in my head worrying over me-or at least what I imagine would be her voice if she'd ever actually inquired about my well-being. 

My trip to New York, my new and future home, last weekend, went well. It was really more of a reconnaissance mission (and her "mission" has to be drawn out in a Bjork-ish voice so that it sounds like "mess-see-awn"), a "must get x, y and z done in a very limited amount of time, on limited funds and with minimal airline fuckups" set of days. And, despite that last bit-the minimal airline fuckups-almost taking a turn for the worst (hey, hey Airtran,  I mean Val-U-Jet, I'm talking to you: FOUR gate changes?  At six in the morning? That's beyond annoying, that's obscene on par with, like, you having graphic sex with my grandmother while I'm in the next room. And then a delay? I was prepped to have to miss my job interview on Friday and blame it ENTIRELY on Airtran, force them to rebook me for a later flight back to Atlanta from NYC on Tuesday to allot for a rescheduling of said interview that would be missed, and I'd expect a god damned cookie with it, too, but fortunately it didn't come to that. I would have treated that customer service rep as though he or she was a student loans collection agent-and that's *not* a good thing. Are you still out there Miss Blair, my favorite student loans collection agent of all time ever?), I must say that the trip was a success...

I spent my Sunday afternoon with my wonderful internet friend who is now obviously my real-life-friend Kelly, aka the person nice/crazy enough to allow me to crash on her couch for a month while I, um, acclimate to New York. And by "acclimate" what I actually mean is "find a job".  And by "find a job" what I actually mean is "holy hell, I am moving like 900 miles and at the moment I am unemployed, so unemployed in fact that I didn't even dare to abbreviate the previously-written 'at the moment' with my usual 'ATM' because 'ATM' conjures images of money and oh my god I have no job". 

My first day in New York, though, I was greeted with this:

"What the hell?", you're probably asking aloud. No? Well, dammit, do it. Ok, there-I'm glad you asked! It just so happens the above is self-explaining:

That's right: now you don't have to separate your beloved popcorn chicken and your awesome large cola!

(Side-note: chicken in a cup reminds me of the now-infamous "chicken in a box in a wok" scene from R Kelly's "Trapped In The Closet". Ok, look, my definition of "infamous" is "constantly cited by my friends and myself". Also, I mean really, "Trapped In The Closet" is a work of genius, a masterstroke only capable of being executed by the master thespian that is Robert Sylvester Kelly.)

Any city that can capitalize on my southern-bred love for laziness AND gross food combinations is a city after my own heart. And my wallet. Whether it's empty or not. Which, at the moment (again, no ATM abbreviations here), is painfully, frighteningly empty. 

It's funny, though, because despite having gone on interviews, being jobless and looking out at the bleak market through the lens of someone getting ready to slog to the Unemployment office and say "yeah, I'll have one with everything", I seem to have more projects to work on than ever.   However, saying "oh, I'm super-busy" only makes me feel that much lamer when there's no actual money coming in at the moment. AGAIN WITH THE NO ATM. Because "no ATM" is how I'm going to be living my life for the foreseeable future.  Maybe I should have listened to my family and gone into, um, "computer repair". There's certainly more money in that than in publishing, marketing and publicity. I think...

Oh, a quick anecdote that makes me feel better: while in NY, I got to listen to a superstar A-list renowned author that I've never read and will never read complain, at a benefit event/museum reading, IN A MUSEUM MIND YOU, AND FOR A BENEFIT, that he didn't get any free alcoholic beverages.

IN A MUSEUM. FOR A BENEFIT.

He then asked for "baby foie gras". You know what that is. Think about it.

I may be poor, but at least I have tact.

Continued...

Title comes first

I'm really relatively unsure as to how to begin this. When I started this blog, I'd decided that, rather than fill it with sappy mush at a furious pace in the beginning, only to leave it sad and unattended like a petulant child refused its own birthday cake and locked in the closet, I would attend to it with a minor degree of professionalism. As professional as a "blog" with a heavy swear-word count and an open letter to Tori Amos asking her to leave her trash bag and publicly denounce Sarah Palin can possibly be. However, the other place on the internet where my words tend to go, my LiveJournal, lay sadly dormant for a while even before the news of its eventual and impending collapse, and now I'm trying to port anything of any interest, relevance or hilarity over here before I wake up one day to find that any and all trace of my internet "blog" (read as: open diary) presence since 2000 has been wiped by disgruntled LJ employees. As such, I kinda feel necessity, like gravity in that R.E.M. song, pulling me to actually write "down the bones" (a Jeanette Winterson-I-think-not-going-to-google-it MFA class phrase that I hate, because I had a poetry professor as an undergrad at Oglethorpe who used it all the time to describe the type of disclosure she demanded in every piece handed in to her. To boycott, or as protest, or simply because I was bored and had to turn something in for a grade, I wrote a poem about how, when I was like 8 years old, I had a hamster that committed suicide. True story. She loved it. I read it aloud for the class.) here in terms of my current life situation.

So, with that typical digression aside, I've been sitting here trying to reconcile talking openly and not in a voice at all about "things", and have been finding it extremely difficult. Usually, with any/everything I write, be it blog post or, uh, blog post (or that "memoir" I'm writing/not-writing), the title comes first.

I have no title for this entry, and I probably won't even once it's finished. So rather than continue to pretend that my pre-apologies and asides are at all compelling, I'll get to those Winterson-esque bones (which, when written as such, makes her sound like a pro-Anorexia postergirl):

Like a giant oak covered in pictures of obscenely-to-the-point-of-hilariously obese cats and filled with far too many books, the past three years of my life are uprooting as we speak.

For the past three years of my life, I've lived in Decatur, GA, which is a little Birkenstock-clad, tofu-eating, super-artsy suburb of Atlanta. Also, for the past three-ish give or take, years of my life, in addition to various other projects (like, you know, collecting those pictures of obscenely fat cats), I've put my marketing and publicity degree to use by mainly serving as the Marketing/PR director for Wordsmiths, a local indie bookstore that I helped conceptualize.

And now I find that position coming to an end. I mean, the economy's super-awesome and publishing is doing really well at the moment, so of course it's a total shocker to me. Note the sarcasm, because as you may not know the economy and job market are both awful, and publishing as an industry keeps taking hit after hit and then scrambling to use words like "monetize" and "twitter".

Running concurrently with this, the two-plus year live-in relationship I've been in has also run its course.

This is where, dear readers, your mental soundtracking should cue Lauryn Hill's voice singing "when it all/all faaaallls down..."...

As such, on March 27th, I do something that, for the longest time, I swore I'd never do: I become a cliche, pack up everything I can't sell for pretzel money and move to New York.

I've lived in Georiga my entire life, with a minor accidental digression to Las Vegas (where I had to beg a random girl in a Barnes and Noble to go on a date with me-ask me about that later, k?), so this is a little...a bit...um...

it's fucking terrifying, is what it is.

I am a fucking southerner. I like screen doors, porch swings, iced tea (with splenda thx), fried green tomatoes...ok, granted, I DO enjoy a good vegan cupcake, but, hell, I say "y'all". And I can't STOP saying "y'all".

I have a place to stay for a brief period of time, and I have...um, well, basically that's about it. I'm hunting and gathering job prospects, but the whole thing has given rise to me finally launching my industrious, cheeky approach to the freelance media/pr/marketing game: RussCommunications, aka RussCommTM.

Check out the awesome logo:


(super-small version, obv)

designed by my friend Amanda Lauter, of MailChimp and LauterHausProductions LLC TLC OPP. I'll obviously be a success, because, um, hello, no one with a sweet-ass logo has ever failed at anything.

(She's promising me business cards, too. I eagerly await them. NO PRESSURE, LAUTER.)

One of my first "clients" (that's what you call them, right, clients? I misplaced my "Communications In The Aughts" handbook) is my former boss Zach Steele's awesome, hilarious and offensive-only-if-you-don't-read-it first novel, Anointed. You can become a fan of RussCommTM on Facebook-forgive the lack of, well, of anything, really, going on with that page, because, um, I still have this to deal with:



that's right. The past years of my life, as seen as books going into boxes.

Obviously only some of my books, my babies, are going to make the trip north with me. It's that culling, the "do I take things I haven't read and risk them sucking? Do I take old favorites? Do I just re-read Special Topics In Calamity Physics over and over again and sigh myself to sleep every night?", that is making it rough.

Right, Russ. That's the ONE thing making the sorting through and packing up of everything tough. Trying to choose which damn John Updike books to keep.

So, I mean, I guess all this is to say that that, in fact, is what's going on in my life at the moment. A lot of listening to Fever Ray. A lot of Grouper, which you may have read already read about. I'll still be writing here, chronicling the "journey", but when I say "journey" I don't mean it like those women who read Eat, Pray, Love but skip the last two bits and then gush over Elizabeth Gilbert saying "thanks for the journey". Or maybe I do? Dunno. Regardless, that will be here.

I'll still be writing about music at Resonator, and hopefully my relocation to New York, finally again close to the two friends with whom Resonator was begun, will allow Res to become a more active community force. I'll still be writing for the fantastic, literary collective group blogA Good Blog Is Hard To Find. Also, as of today, I'm excited to announce that I'll be doing book reviews and writing for BabyGotBooks, the lit blog that I joined forces with in my previous position to throw some seriously cool rock-n-roll book party extravaganza things.

So, I mean, that's me. Right now. With the emotion swept aside for the moment, and the boxes, like the future, looming. Expect to see more pictures of those boxes.

And yes. I am making this sound way easier than it's going to be.

Continued...