Follow the Lighted Promenade

The first week of student teaching has been fine. There's been little teaching at all as my cooperating teacher is the department head and has the nearly unfathomable task of getting all the new literature and grammar books out. But I've stayed positive, as has he. I am really looking forward to getting started though. I've got some ideas and the students seem nice (if not overly ambitious.) It's a tall order and I'm already tired most of the time, though. And I feel lonely. It's not like the times before when I was a zitty faced kid and was forced to be alone. This is a completely self-imposed isolation, I come home at night ready to make calls and see people and I just can't. I've been able to talk to Sarah. I feel very open to her but also very vulnerable and take everything personally. I think it's because I can't open up right now very often so when I do, I go all the way, am probably too open and wear my heart on my sleeve,

It's just a whole other trip I guess. Everything. I'm on this whole other trip right now, different even from last week. I'm not down at all, I'm just OUT THERE and that isn't always so bad. Being an introvert (which indeed I am) I think that the prospect of spending so much time in front of people, all the time, is causing some flickering behind the eyes and maybe I'm just gearing up for it. I'm okay. Just random. On the noisy shore, standing at the edge of you. Could these dreams of your's be true? Katrina is right. I do have lots of mood swings, can be very difficult. I've been pretty good at not subjecting people to these (besides poor Sarah) but that's why the idea of so much time alone appeals to me. I can be weird and difficult and no one is there to see it. New Mexico, the west, a distant, dusty, lonely sanitarium. Wow, what am I saying? I'm fine. Really!

Are productivity and creativity mutually exclusive? I think that I have proven that this is not so. I've been busy but my mind has been hummin', quite alive with sound, but it's been nice. Usually when my mind's all active like this I get really antisocial, like there's too much goin' on in my brain and any input is too much. But now I feel very creative and explosively optimistic - and I've been getting things done. I bought a bunch of lame teacher pants at the Village yesterday, not my style at all, but one must make concessions to work in such a visual field. I've always thought that the flannel shirts and the Floyd t-shirts worked to my advantage as a teacher, but cest la vie. It was nice buying clothes so cheap. Money and I are mutually exclusive. Went camping at Clifty Falls with Michelle and Matt. We hiked until Matt was dead (about 400 feet), probably the most spectacular of all Indiana state parks. I wrote most of the description

The sunset fled behind the trees, a radiant red amidst the green. Adam and I sit on the bleachers. The corn is very high in August. I have a moment watching the sun set among the swelling horizon clouds, one of those times when you just feel so alive that nothing matters anywhere. I've had more moments this year than in any other in recent memory. I remember a wee-hours kiss in the Turkey Run Inn. listening to "Mutations" and driving a stick in Alabama. talking of big things in a London coffee shop with art on the walls. hearing the April winds sing through the screens. riding through an unexpected downpour on the Erie-Lackawana. seeing the sunset through the skylights at Kickapoo...a bathroom moment. passing through Tyler where I breathed my first. watching the wind run through the soybeans in waves off to the horizon, exploring a new bike trail. And this weekend. A late night walk. Perkins. Hitting a homer into the corn. Watching a fledgling thunder

Adam and I are just about to head off to Dyersville, IA, to the Field of Dreams. What can be better than a summer baseball roadtrip? (Those three words might be the best in the English language.) The road is long and full of bends. Certain wounds only time can mend. Take it easy friend.

There is certainly a light in August. It's so wonderful and profoundly sad. There is no time of year like August, when everything is in its prime before the inevitable lonely winds of fall sweep from the northwest, the mysterious north, and the acrid smokefires start to burn. I've been sick. Lying on Sunday in an allergy pill stupor, my big bloated medicinehead floating in and out of consciousness, I looked out on the almost darkness, the light of August. If you could contain that colour, I would paint everything. Friends would walk into my house and burst into tears. It's a sadness so deep that it's not really a sadness. For me, it's got something to do with lost connections. There is something so primal in that August light that you ache because of it, a happiness and sadness too great for the feeble human mind to absorb. I stood on the porch on Sunday I think, dehydrated and hot, looking out to the west. The winds were picking up, promising the storm t