Wild Wild Newsletter

Sweet readers,
The past few weeks have reminded me of some writing projects I used to undertake that, one way or another, I no longer do. For a period in high school and through some of college, a childhood friend Pressly & I traded fragments of texts we called "splurfs" (I don't remember why). Anywhere from 4 words to a few sentences. I think we each used them in our own ways, occasionally as fodder for other creative affairs, but more often as just a dumping ground for curious phrases that emerged from our weird brains. This morphed for me at some point into ideas for ironic/snarky t-shirts I might print, and in parallel, mix CD titles. I don't think I consciously register thoughts like these anymore.

 

For a while, I contributed to my friend Rosa's candy reviews & news blog, ZOMG Candy. It was when I was in Nijmegen and had a very different set of candies I could sample, particularly when I visited corners of Germany. Around the time I moved back to the States, Rosa wound the blog down and handed over the reins for the domain to some other fan. Another project I had at the same time was microfiction about lost gloves, with an Internet friend. We'd both noticed lost solo gloves and wanted to do a photo project with them. Kim suggested we speculate on their origins. It was a fun idea I wouldn't have had on my own, and the project let me exist just a little differently on grey, slushy streets. 

 

I miss all of these in their own way and yet can't imagine restarting any of them, except the splurfs for myself, because those friendships and my needs to express myself have changed. I guess I'm mourning them but not in a deep, sad, way, merely acknowledging the effects of time. How's YOUR January/February going? Should I write next month about other nostalgia?

 

I thought I'd have articles to share this time, but nothing pops out at me from my Pocket stack as something I actually read in January. Oops! I DID finish The Art of Gathering, which I can't stop talking about. I want to breathe a bit then re-read it to write my response work to it. I also started dabbling in The Creativity Project, a set of prompts & responses from children's books illustrators. Some resonate with me, others seem cute, and others I just skip over. 

 

It was a month of lots of eating out, between my birthday, being displaced from our house for a week+ (see below), and a bunch of other celebrations & reconnections. Restaurant outings included Zahav, Ants Pants, Forsythia, Cafe Y Chocolate, K'far, Audrey Claire, Pizzeria Vetri, Merkaz, and the Lancaster Brewing Company. The most delightful was a sumptuous dinner at Scanicchio's, partly because Mayor Kenney himself had specifically told my brother's girlfriend she should go there. Worth it. It's just down the street from me. Come down and see for yourself! Another unique experience was a multi-course vegan brunch made by my friends Bill & Jen, capped off with a pandan leaf tembleque and crisph havalah rice with a navel orange gel. Below is a "pambazo" from Cafe Y Chocolate, "a sandwich with bread bathed in red sauce, filled with Mexican sausage and potatoes, queso fresco & sour cream. Served with a side of eggs and a side of beans."

 

Kelsey & I are trying to intentionally listen to a specific artist a week, randomly picked from a set of 52 we wrote on slips of paper halfway through the month. Some acts I chose include names I don't know well (like Jason Isbell) and some are familiar (like David Byrne). In January, we drew Beck and Jay-Z. My God, they've both done SO MUCH and been around for so long in our lives, huh? (I'll give credit for this project idea to the charming Nate & Meagan.) I also spent some time when I needed to concentrate listening to numbers stations and getting pulled into web-based shortwave radio, as I've threatened before... 

 

I'll make this one swift. On 2/12 I'm hosting the Penn Nursing StorySlam. Then on Sunday the 16th, I'll be at the Blue Stoop meetup with Broad Street Review friends. And my next N Crowd show is 2/28. 

 

Some of the big excitement of the month was a sewage disaster in our basement. I shopvacced up about 3 gallons of raw sewage from what's effectively my home office bathroom. There was a broken pipe, a blockage in the pipe, and a whole lot of backflow goin' on. It was gross. On the upside, our landlady-housemate was wonderful about all this, many friends were generous with their homes, and things are back to normalish. Water line insurance, city homeowners, look into it.

 

We spent New Year's Day at Winterthur, which was a peaceful and reflective start to the year. On the last day of the month, Kelsey & I headed to Conestoga PA for an Airbnb weekend getaway. More on that next month! 


It's not yet iced coffee season?
Neil