Done yesterday at lunch.

Follow me on Twitter for first peeks at poems.

I don’t know if I’ve made this clear in other posts, but Meg and I are absolutely, positively, without-a-doubt moving to Austin, Texas around the beginning of August. Meg will be attending the University of Texas to get her Master of Science in Sustainable Design, and I will be working full-time (yikes!) somewhere to support us.

What we are excited about:

1. warm (hot) weather
2. the unbelievable music/arts scene
3. the abnormally large number of dachschund rescues in the area
4. tacos ‘n’ BBQ
5. cowboy boots

What we are NOT excited about:

1. the cheese factor of living in a city that shares my first name
2. getting a new job
3. moving
4. finding an apartment

As our move approaches, I’ve been thinking more an more about quality of life — how easy we have it here in Cleveland, and how we might make it even better in Texas. For us, anxiety is usually only the product of Unknown Factors, and our Unknown Factors are big ones: Where To Live and Where to Work.

There was a New Yorker article on commuting a week or so ago (it coincidentally had a cool illustration of Glenn Ganges in traffic by Kevin Huizenga) that had a very practical way of looking at the Where To Live, Where To Work question:

Putnam likes to imagine that there is a triangle, its points comprising where you sleep, where you work, and where you shop. In a canonical English village, or in a university town, the sides of that triangle are very short: a five-minute walk from one point to the next. In many American cities, you can spend an hour or two travelling each side. “You live in Pasadena, work in North Hollywood, shop in the Valley,” Putnam said. “Where is your community?” The smaller the triangle, the happier the human, as long as there is social interaction to be had. In that kind of life, you have a small refrigerator, because you can get to the store quickly and often. By this logic, the bigger the refrigerator, the lonelier the soul.

Our triangle here in Cleveland is pretty small: we can’t walk to work, but we can and do walk to the grocery store, to the Chipotle, to the book store. I’m hoping we can find a similar situation in Austin.

As for the job search, I have this Bruce Eric Kaplan cartoon posted to the fridge:

If you are an employer — or if you know of an employer — in Austin who is looking for a writer/designer with plenty o’ computer, web design, and customer service experience…please contact me!

“As I got older…I kept thinking, ‘What is this Ghoulardi thing? What is it? What? What?’ We went back to Cleveland once when I was 14 and we were mobbed at the airport by people chanting ‘Ghoulardi! Ghoulardi!’ And when I do interviews anywhere in the country, constantly, constantly, people who are enamored of my father or who grew up with him bring him up or even thank me for Ghoulardi!”

- PT Anderson, interview with the Toledo Blade, 2000

WMFU’s Beware of The Blog! beat me to the punch:

Cleveland’s most legendary horror host was unmistakably Ghoulardi. He was only on the air for about three years (63-66), but he left an indelible impression. His real name was Ernie Anderson, and after retiring Ghoulardi, he moved to Hollywood and become a legendary voice-over artist (he was the voice of The Love Boat, the Carol Burnett Show, and pretty much every top 40 radio station). He is also the father of none other than director Paul Thomas Anderson, who pretty much based the Philip Baker Hall character in Magnolia on him.

But most importantly, Ghoulardi used that booming, commanding voice to unleash an anarchistic spirit. Rather than just play bad movies and make jokes, he began setting up blue screens and dropping in random images over the top of the film, or making strange noises over the soundtrack. And things weren’t any better outside of the movie, where his set could be pure chaos. He was topical, he was funny as hell, he was just plain weird, he WAS the counterculture invading the average middle-American’s television. Nobody that saw a Ghoulardi show ever forgot it, and in a way he shaped the weird climate of Cleveland in the late 60s and early 70s. David Thomas of Pere Ubu was one of his disciples and describes watching his show as such:

“Everyone who saw Ghoulardi will tell a favorite story – like the night he set off a egregiously large home-made explosive device sent it by a fan – he was always setting off fireworks and blowing up things in the studio – and quite clearly off-camera crew were telling Ghoulardi not to light it up and you could see people running across the studio, the camera abandoned to skew off balance, pointing at the floor, and then the entire room was stunned senseless for some minutes… live… smoke, curtains on fire, people stumbling around…”

Read more about Ghoulardi.

And of course I have to note that my future father-in-law (two months!) wrote the book on Ghoulardi (literally), and that you should buy it:

(click to make it bigger…)

A poem of mine, “I saw a man on my way to work,” was selected for the second year of the Cleveland Regional Transit Authority’s MOVING MINDS: VERSE AND VISION PROJECT. The piece will be displayed on over 700 trains and buses all around Cleveland for the next year.

The card’s design was by Kayne Toukonen, a student from the Glyphix Design Studio at Kent State’s School of Visual Communication Design.

Here’s the Official RTA Press Release, and announcement from the Poets and Writers League of Greater Cleveland site (which, has scans of all the bus cards, including my favorite.)

Back in May, Meghan and I were invited to the RTA headquarters to celebrate the unveiling of the cards with a reception and poetry reading. They had a special bus parked out front, displaying all the cards. Here’s my ugly mug in front of the piece:

And hamming it up for the photographer:

And a great pic of Meg with the bus driver, who was cool enough to chat with us about the bus’s soundsystem, and let Meghan pull the horn:

All in all, it was a fun project. 200,000 people ride the RTA every day, and I love the idea that random people from all over the city will see the work. It’s like legitimized graffiti.

They altered the poem slightly for the card, so here’s the original (and an embarrassing video of me reading it):

I saw a man on my way to work

standing in the middle of his yard
hands in his pockets
watching clouds and traffic

He caught me looking at him,
and gave me the eye
as if to say,

“Son, what do you do that’s so important?”

Yesterday, for the first time since spring hit, Meg and I went for a walk in Lakeview Cemetery. It’s my favorite place to walk in Cleveland Heights, close to the apartment, way better than any park, and massive enough that you can get lost. When it was warm and I had the day off, I’ve gone there to draw and read. (I also like to look at the names and the dates and make up stories about the families.) Next pretty weekend, we’re going to take some salami sandwiches and books over there and camp out for the day.

I didn’t have my camera or my sketchbook with me yesterday, so I drew the picture above from memory. Instead of a traditional marker in the center of the family plot, these folks had planted a magnolia tree. The flowers from the tree blossoms were falling, so the petals made a perfect, beautiful blanket of pink and white over the graves. It was the prettiest thing I’ve seen all year.