I’ve been making a few subtle changes to the site.

1. More categories! For the first time ever, the “uncategorized” category is empty. This should help readers find old posts easier. I still need to go back and see which posts now fit under some of the new categories I’ve added. It’s not perfect, but it’s better than it was.

2. Ad Free! Aren’t corporate ads on websites obnoxious? Every now and then, I get an email from some ad agency offering to buy up space on my site. The graphic/link on my side bar is your indication that I am ideologically opposed to ads on my blog. Many of the new blog templates out there have huge blank spaces for corporate ads, and I think they detract from the real commentary and devalue the medium as a whole. For example, Grist, the “environmental news and commentary” blog, currently whores out space for google, Microsoft, Caterpiller, and Fat Tire Beer. Sorry, I have strong views and they’re not for sale. I keep the link at the very bottom of my site to plug the folks who designed the original template for this site (even though I’ve made some dramatic changes to their template).

3. I’m currently organizing a separate page of links. I’ll keep the AZ links on my page, but as for the rest of them, I’m greatly expanding with links to many many more blogs — spanning politics, environmentalism, feminism, education, and media resources. Please email me with links you think readers would find useful.

I think I trash talk the midwest too much. I’m home visiting my parents and these have been highlights…

lightening bugs!

thick forests (where it hasn’t been cut…)

corn (sorry AZ, you’ve got nothing on the corn they have here)

eating peppermint ice cream and watching Nazis’be sentenced to death in the Nuremburg Trials on dad’s History Channel WWII box set

finding an old fugazi cd

reading a ghost story I wrote in 6th grade

helping the parents decide what kind of bicycles to buy

Last summer’s retaining wall project turned out pretty good, especially now that the grass has grown in all around it. Having learned a lot about the process last year, we’re repeating this for the front yard on a smaller scale. Ideally the tires on the front wall will be just as effective in retaining/terracing the front, but won’t show at all. We’ll plant a bunch of native grasses and plants on and around it, nothing edible of course.

We’ve been playing in the dirt for a couple of days now: moving dirt, separating rocks, filling, stacking, pounding, shoveling, excavating and pick-axing. Having spent the last month teaching in NAU’s STAR Program, it was actually pretty nice to do some work of this nature. As I shovel, I like to think of how long humans have been doing work like this. Moving dirt, the sound of the shovel working it’s way through sand and rock, is a very old sound. I think that’s why it’s so calming to sit next to a river or listen to the wind blow through the trees. These are very old sounds.

It’s a little bothersome to bury industrial waste in your yard, but it’s nice to make use out of garbage. We got the idea from Earthship. Check it out; I think this stuff is amazing. To me, this is what “green building” is really about. I don’t think I’d live in a tire house, but there are a lot of other options and combinations of options to build a house that is the closest thing to “no impact” that there is.

I’ve also been spending time with this year’s garden. It’s as ready for the monsoons as I am. This year: strawberries, assorted tomatoes, jalapeños, green chilies, red chilies, peppers, and a few herbs. We’re going to experiment with cloning too. Not in a creepy mad scientist way, but in the traditional manner of slicing a budding branch in the right way, planting it, and watching it sprout roots of it’s own.

I love watching the monsoons build. It hasn’t stormed yet, but every day for the last week or so, ominous clouds build, the humidity raises, lightening strikes, thunder rumbles, it sprinkles, then….it all goes away. Any bets on when the sky will explode?

That’s not entirely true. I’ve been writing a lot. I’m working on something that is turning out to be huge. In the meantime, I’ve been neglecting this website.

I’ve been searching for jobs for the past several months. It’s been a daunting, thought-provoking task to say the least. This is what I’ve been writing about. I have accepted a teaching position at Winslow High School. I’ll be teaching upper-level English and a few honors English classes. I’m not happy about the 40 minute commute, but I will be happy to stick around Flagstaff. Apparently two other teachers make this commute and I could get in on a carpool scenario.

I am planning on jump-starting this site again. Now that I’ve got a job, I can stop thinking about it and dedicate more of my energy to this site again. I will write a little something here every day to bring back my small audience of loyal readers….so stay tuned.

If anyone has any insider knowledge of Winslow and what it might be like to teach there, please don’t hesitate to enlighten me.

I’ve been house-sitting at Melissa’s and treating it as my “fortress of solitude,” which means lots of reading, writing, and playing outside.

I’ll be back full-force very very soon.

Hey, I’m back! I took a small, unannounced hiatus. Expect a whole lot to read this week.

I hope everyone had a great New Years. Mine was all over the place. I showed up at Casebeers late and I missed This Runs on Blood (sob), but managed to see a few others and made some new friends. Before midnight, I walked downtown and managed to meet up with some peeps despite not having a phone on me. That’s Flagstaff I guess. I wanted to see that stupid pinecone drop because I’ve never been in Flagstaff for New Years.

Somehow, I managed to get to the second floor of the Weatherford, dodging drunken mayhem along the way. I looked down on a sea of heads bobbing to whatever generic-ass band the city had playing in the street. There had to be at least a thousand people standing in the freezing cold, watching a paper mache pinecone sway in the breeze. It would have been a good time for a crime spree.

The whole thing was pretty ridiculous, but quite the spectacle. When the clock struck 12, everyone of course went nuts. Some guy ran up and put his arm around me and, with his other arm, grabbed the ass of the woman in front of me….making it seem like I did it. I was pissed and shoved the guy. There must be a 5 second window during this time when people know they can get away with anything. The woman didn’t even care.

Don’t get lost in the snow out there!

I apologize for posts being so sparse during the last week or so. I went to a Halloween party and instead of waking up the next morning with a hangover, I woke up with the flu! Oh man it was gross: achy, vomit, blasting headaches, 15 hours of sleep a day interrupted by trips to the bathroom, sips of Echinacea tea. Living under wooly blankets, watching terrible movies, pawing away dogs that were starved for attention, subsisting on bread and soup….I don’t remember the last time I was that sick.

I’m almost back to 100% now. Things are looking up. Now I have piles and piles of papers to grade on a Halloween night, interrupted by trick or treaters, and perhaps a zombie movie. Speaking of which, I saw 30 Days of Night last night in celebration of solid bowels. More than one person (albeit unreliable film opinions) told me that this movie was great. Horrible! The end didn’t make a lick of sense. It doesn’t do the graphic novel any justice.

The Noise is out. I’m in it. You should read it. For the December issue, I’m looking at animal rights issues, particularly exposing NAU’s animal testing. Before I lie to them so they’ll talk to me, I wanted to ask if anyone knows any information or particular people I should speak to about this. That would rock my world.

The anti-Columbus Day rally at City Hall went pretty well. It was a bit cold, but I saw a lot of people I know and met even more. About 99% of the feedback we got from passing motorists was positive. The only comment I could make out that was negative came from an F-150 whipping around the corning yelling “timber!” This was obviously in reference to our Save the Peaks banner. Oh well. It was probably really funny to him, though pretty douche-baggy to us. One woman slowed her car, read every single banner, then honked yelling “right on!”

Afterwards a lot of us went to Applesauce for open mic night. Holy crap, it was packed! It’s been a while since I’ve been to one of these; Aaron must really be working hard to get the word out. I’m going to start going more. Maybe I’ll come up with an act. The banner I helped to hold at the rally, “We Do Not Celebrate Genocide,” was hung up on the stage to promote the theme of the evening. As usual, the acts were pretty hit or miss, but worth attending nonetheless.

About 12 or so acts in, I sauntered over to 111 and saw a couple bands, picked up This Runs On Blood’s new record. Numbers, a band from San Fran, were all really nice, but I thought they were a little boring. It was pretty late by the time they started playing though.

It seems like all I’ve been doing lately is grading papers and stacking wood….so it was a nice break.

I woke up this morning and found a bloody hole in my dog’s leg. The skin around the wound was burned. I have reason to believe it is a bb gun or pellet gun shot wound. The vet was perplexed because he couldn’t find anything lodged inside of her. She received 4 staples.

If anyone has any useful information, please let me know. To a possible trigger-happy-douch-bag neighbor: you’ll be very sorry when I find you.

Artist, musician, and friend of mine, Chris, painted me something based off a list I gave him of my favorite colors, words, images, and ideas. From that list, his process for determining which words he’ll use from the list is a pretty simple one. He read the list several times and focused on the words that appealed to him as an individual and as an artist. This is what those of us who study language mean when we speak of the impossibility of an author being absent from any piece of rhetoric, whether it be an essay, a poem, a news report, a song, or, even a painting.

Anyway, the words he drew out from my list are: the moon, ancient, sleeping (I love sleeping), and mountains. He also used my favorite colors, which I just labeled “earth tones, with purple in moderation.” The original sketch had a monkeywrench looming in the background, but Chris decided it would detract from the rest of the work (but it’s still there in spirit…in the title).

When I first saw it, I really liked it, though wasn’t sure if it resembled me. Then I thought about a line, one that I either heard, read, or wrote myself—I don’t remember, but it still sums up what is important to me—“we are just as much a part of our environment as our environment is a part of us.”

The sleeping figure, though I can’t grow a magnificent beard like that (and great beards should always be described as magnificent, I think), caught me off guard because even though I love sleeping, I don’t think such an illustration is very complimentary. But I think it captures how I feel right now. I feel in between destinations.

I just finished grad school and, during that chaotic time, I was thinking that a PhD. would be my obvious next step, but now I’m having second thoughts. I’m not sure I could sit though more lectures, thinking, reading, writing, and theorizing about the state of the world. I know it’s messed up and I’m tired of thinking and talking about it. I’m beginning to see my niche and I’m not sure more education will enhance that or not. Now that I’m not taking classes, I’m simply teaching them, I already realize and value the time I have to dedicate to myself and activist causes.

I’ve been talking to people and I’ve got some projects and collaborations on the horizon and I have realized that that is what I love. The column I write, the workshops I give for the MARS Project, the environmental work that I do….these are the things that are important to me and these are the things that I love. All I need to do is figure out a way to translate that passion and those activities to a living wage. I’m not saying a PhD. is out, it’s just that I’m not sure that’s what I want to do immediately…and this is for many reasons.

Activists, radicals, deep ecologists, writers, anarchists…all of us…are eventually confronted with having to negotiate the tension between ideology and a paycheck. It’s rough that the same system you seek to change is the same system that you are dependent on to live. I need a job that will fulfill both, but I know it’s ultimately up to me. If I work from 8 until 5 or 6 every day, that leaves 4 or 5 hours a day that I can use for my own projects. Maybe this is why I haven’t even thought of dating anybody during the last year. Any helpful suggestions would be appreciated. I know I’m not the only one that faces these issues.