time is on your side

But that's only because time is on all sides. Propelling us and surrounding us all at once.

From one degree, it is a train zooming straight into you, blasting through you, and yet from another angle it is disappearing over the foot-hills off in the distance.

Where does the time go? And more importantly -- WHAT WILL HAPPEN?

We can't catch up.

Time is a tattoo, branding you in long cursive letters... "this too shall pass."


And I'm so glad that 'soonlikenow' has been here to leave its mark. This is our one-year anniversary, this collection and I.

Together we took in Africa, and found a way to translate it as best we could. Together we turned one inaugural ticket into, well, a few.

We scattered poetry all around. And humor. We posted definitive songs and music videos that served as the soundtrack to our ever-unfolding story.

Me and these photos, this writing, all of it. We took you all over the country! And we had no idea how much we would appreciate having a record of it, in retrospect.

At the time it was the process of posting that helped me interpret these experiences. And now they sit as archives so that they'll never be lost to me.

The illusion of time can make it difficult to iconize the very exceptional eras that we happen to be floating upon. That is, until they are beyond our reach, or any hope of reconnaissance.

To have been writing this story as it has been taking place is the best gift I could have asked for as I wrap up this amazing year.

I look forward to continue building momentum, and to be a happy passenger on this crazy train of time.

Something's coming something's coming somethings... somethings...

"The ethnographer observes behavior but goes beyond it to inquire about the meaning of that behavior. The ethnographer sees artifacts and natural objects but goes beyond them to discover what meanings people assign to these objects. The ethnographer observes and records emotional states but goes beyond them to discover the meaning of fear, anger, and other feelings."

--Conformity and Conflict: Readings in Cultural Anthropology

where does the time go?

It all happens



so soon-like.

Day of the Dead...

I've finally gotten caught up with uploading photos. See them here.

jazzjazzjazz

"An important idea to consider here is that blues was predominantly a blues-based music. The blues timbre and spirit had come to jazz virtually unchanged, even though the early Negro musicians using European instruments had to learn to play them with the strict European march music as a model. The "classical" timbre of the trumpet, the timbre that Creoles imitated, was not the timbre that came into jazz. The purity of tone that the European trumpet player desired was put aside by the Negro trumpeter for a more humanly expressive sound of the voice. The brass sound came to the blues, but it was a brass sound hardly related to its European models. The rough, raw sound the black man forced out of these European instruments was a sound he had cultivated in this country for two hundred years. It was an American sound, something indigenous to a certain kind of cultural existence in this country."

--Amiri Baraka,
Blues People

[goin' steady]

They're all my boyfriends. Whether they know it or not.

All the jolly old bums who hang around and make fun of each other in Jackson Square, calling me names like sassy and caramel.

And the freshly dressed brown boys who skateboard the streets of the French Quarter in packs, never giving any woman (including myself) so much as a wink.

Cashiers at corner stores who work to fit as many lame jokes as possible into our 2-minute interaction.

The bar hosts standing out on Bourbon Street holding large menus, working to corral groups of tourists into overpriced restaurants. Hosts who reach out for hugs when I pass them after I get off work. Hosts who offer to buy me dinner at restaurants much nicer than their own.

And every last trombone player. They're all my boyfriends.

And how about the high school boys trying to act tough on their walk home from the school bus, yelling to each other extra-vulgar in order to compensate for their matching uniform slacks and tucked in polo's.

The traveler kids playing washboard, banjo, and fiddle in doorsteps for cash. Wailing old folk songs up over my head and to the moon while I dance and we pass around a brown paper bag of grain alcohol.

Shoot, even my actual boyfriends are my boyfriends.

But so are the tour guides who stop into the shop where I work, just to shoot the shit a little bit before leading big groups of imbiciles from all over the country around the Quarter, enchanting them with their exaggerated historic fables intermingled with ghost stories.

The cute barista guys who get all shy when I toss a dollar in their tip jar.

The young rapper boys in the neighborhood who don't know how to talk to women and get caught off guard by my intolerance for bullshit. Boys who shout out "Simi-Automatic! Pop pop pop!" From blocks away when they see me pass. Boys who commission me to record verses about money, cars, and clothes onto their tracks.

I love them. All of them.

Especially the hot dog vendors, in all their ridiculousness.

And the tragic looking white boys skulking prettily on their porches every day -- the ones who smile-wave, but don't say hello, just look on longingly at everything that passes them by.

And the old, seasoned, mind-blowing jazz musicians playing on the corner in hopes of catching a few five-dollar-bills in their cases. I see them every day -- some times I sit and listen, other times I bring them a beer in exchange for an on-street music lesson, but most times I just zoom on past, skivvies showing under a little dress atop my cruiser bicycle because I'm late for work.

And yet I go home to nobody, no one, except my guitar, and we keep each other up late singing one big love song to the whole damn city of New Orleans.

This girl. Her head. Her heels.

Who knows!

the hood

My neighborhood, Faubourg Marigny, was rated 2nd best in the country.

That's only because the APA is trippin' and hasn't yet realized that it's THE BEST PLACE IN THE ENTIRE WORLD.

Also doesn't hurt to have a new resident who's this freakin adorable. Hey.

so I never made it back to minnesota.

I'm still just as here as ever.

today's horoscope

"Is the electron a wave or a particle? Physicists had to conduct thousands of experiments to arrive at the definitive answer, which is that it's both. In other words, the solution to one of the fundamental questions about the nature of reality is a paradox. I think this strongly suggests that the correct response to many other riddles about the ultimate truth might be two seemingly opposing explanations. Could the Unitarians and Buddhists both be right? Socialists and capitalists? Mystics and scientists? In the upcoming days, Aries, you will be offered lots of practice in adopting this approach as you deal with a personal dilemma that's very much akin to "Is the electron a wave or a particle?"

Is reality Minneapolis or New Orleans? One of the two has just got to be a breach.

I'm about to hop on a plane with an empty suitcase. I'm about to go home and fill it.

It's been over a month since I first left for New Orleans, expecting to stay for a week, have some good times, and then keep traveling. And now, 6 weeks later, I'm reluctantly heading to the airport make a visit to the very bizarre other-world where I grew up. I'm leaving behind friends, plans, music, my job, my house, and all of the things I had initially packed in the suitcase that I've been living out of.

Reality has relocated. My dreams even take place here now.

I'm nervous about finding myself in Minnesota and suddenly waking up from this amazing dream that has just flown by. In weeks I've lived lifetimes here. I'm afraid to put this lady of a city on hold and interrupt the endless, gaseous, go-go-go she has so generously showered me in.

I really am excited to get some love and some grounding by my beautiful people at home, who I know now more than ever are to be people I will absolutely ALWAYS love.

But I can't say I won't be daydreaming about her sweltering afternoons, her street parties, her lackadaisical rhythm, her neighborhood characters, and her catfish po'boys the whole time. . .

"The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it. Resist it, and your soul grows sick with longing for the things it has forbidden to itself."

--Oscar Wilde

"She's not like other cities with no discerning palate. New Orleans knows what she likes and what she doesn't like. She's got her own tastes for the sort of people she wants to rub elbows with. If she likes you, she will shower you with opportunity and luck. She will take you by the hand and lead you to the people you will love for the rest of this life. She will dazzle you with her beauty and charm. Pour you drinks with a heavy hand, laugh outrageously at your jokes. Deliver the muse to your door at 2am and a roast beef po'boy dripping with gravy. And you'll be so happy. You'll call your family in other places and say, 'Finally, I'm home.'"

--Andrea Boll,
The Parade Goes On Without You

that fiction

Who knows the importance of happy or sad, really
in regard to our decisions,
in regard to our dreams.

It's not so much hard work
as it is hard want

and immense appreciation.

howl to the moon

Tomorrow is my 2 week anniversary of ever having been in New Orleans.

In that time, I've already decided on a whim to stay and live here, already been working a job, already secured a great place to live, shed my previous plans, traversed the Louisiana countryside and explored the swamps, outdone myself, had my heart broken, started volunteering at a nonprofit book collective, been a fully functioning resident out of my lone vacation-minded suitcase, and voluntarily turned on the air conditioning for the first time in over two years.

It's hot down here.

I am committed to getting to the bottom of whatever the hell it is that makes this strange other universe called New Orleans so fucking magical. It's a tragic magic. It's a seepy, sultry, ghosty, blues song of a town. And I, for one, am haunted.

My hypothesis is that it must be some combination of the very electric humidity/history which keeps the spirit world hanging in the air. It's thick like a curtain, or a blessing, or a warning, depending on what kind of day you've had.

That and the fact that they don't bury their dead under the ground.

This whole town is howling.

New Orleans

Series 1, of many.

archives

This is may have been the most important day of my life that I didn't live to experience.

My grandma and my grandma were wed in 1953.

And these, dear friends, are some of the most beautiful images I've ever seen. I couldn't believe they came from old family albums, and had just been collecting dust for years.

Finding these photos means the world to me, because when it comes to true love, my grandparents are my heroes.



















To true love.

the nature of our relationship

is abound with change.

The livelihood of my trusted camera is no more. The camera that I took you to Africa through! The camera that's taken hundreds of pictures of you.

And it'll be awhile before I can keep updating this thing with my adventures through my photos.

However, on the same day my camera broke, I unearthed an archive of other images that tell my story nonetheless.

That and your imagination. This is about to get good, I think.

on the topic of looking for answers

"up north"

family style.


























At least we have our DNA in common.

a honeymoon

and a whole bunch of other really beautiful things that have recently taken place in Northern California.