Dear Diary

I have been silent for a while. I should first note that summer weather has finally arrived in Atlanta. It makes me happy. The change in the weather coincided with my starting my new job. Another good thing. But, as always, there is a catch. I haven't actually been given this new job yet. I am assured that this will happen any day now, but I've been hearing that for weeks. I thought for sure that it would happen before I was set to begin my new schedule, but no such luck. I am now finishing my first week with my new hours and I will have Friday and Saturday off. Both of them. In a row. I know some of you take such things for granted but it will be my first honest to God two day weekend in almost two years. This is very exciting. I'm sure that before long I too will take it for granted and come to think that I am somehow entitled to it, but right now it seems wonderfully decadent.

Things have been a bit slow otherwise. This is partly dictated by finances. The money from teaching has gone away and the extra money that the new position brings with it has gotten clogged in the bowels of the bureaucracy here. So I haven't exactly been living it up as of late. That said, we did have a pretty good party at our moldy pad last weekend. Attendees consumed an entire keg of PBR, and since I felt I should be a good host, I matched them with a bottle of Jameson. A good time was had.

Mostly I've been reading and composing and renting DVDs. I watched the fourth season of The Sopranos in anticipation of the release of the fifth season. I checked out Six Feet Under as so many people had said that I would really like it. Me? Death? What? I watched the pilot and thought it was shamefully bad. Second episode not much better, but by the third episode I thought it was beginning to find its way. However, I didn't feel compelled to invest ten more hours in it. So I switched to Deadwood. No complaints there. Good stuff. Well written and compelling. Perhaps I just prefer my soap operas with gritty historical detail.

I've finished two songs, the first of which is an instrumental and a companion of sorts to a piece I mostly wrote fifteen years ago and then tinkered with for a decade or so. The second is about finished but needs lyrics and those almost always come last for me. When they come at all--I mostly write instrumental stuff. I knew these couple of tunes were pretty good when I kept hearing them in my head and thinking "what the hell is that? that's pretty cool" before realizing it was what I'd been working on. I received a confirmation of sorts when my roomie told his buddy at the party that the stuff I'd been writing sounded like "strange circus music."

I've been reading some Joseph Mitchell again: Old Mr. Flood and The Bottom of the Harbor. I think I can say at this point that he is one of my very favorite writers. I finished Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and enjoyed it a great deal. The unfolding whodunit narrative is fine, but it's the wordplay inspired by the main character, Lionel, who suffers from Tourette's, that makes the book a pleasure. I may check out his other stuff, Fortress of Solitude in particular, soon. Before Lethem I was on a bit of a Steinbeck kick: read The Wayward Bus and reread Tortilla Flats and Cannery Row, two of my favorite books. I started The Grapes of Wrath and set it aside. I like Steinbeck best when his books are small, modest, intimate and a bit drunk. I'm still casting about for what to read next. Any suggestions?