MAILING LIST

If you'd like to be added (we don't give it to anyone and only use it to announce events or new releases), email mike[at]sneezingcow.com.  Email and zip is fine, snail mail if you wish.  The zip helps us let you know when I'm coming to your area.

Going to speak in Menomonie tomorrow.  They've put together a neat page of things I'd forgotten about, plus a "Nobbern" photo gallery. 

Took the two girls out into the woods later in the day and we brought home a nice load of bone-dry oak we split and stacked out there back in early spring.  I am in no mood to rush time, but hefting those nicely cured oak chunks I couldn't help but look forward to a night when the snow is deep and the wind is high, and they'll crackle away and we'll feel all the warmer for having gathered the wood as a family.

Took on way too much this year.  Need to adjust the plan of attack.  But I'm out here writing tonight and in the house my two little girls are sleeping and their mother is finishing up another long day of doing so much for us, and in the manner of Jim Harrison, I feel bound to bow in the six directions:

Beware, o wanderer, the road is walking too,
said Rilke one day to no one in particular
as good poets address the six directions.
If you can't bow, you're dead meat. You'll break
like uncooked spaghetti. Listen to the gods.
They're shouting in your ear every second

            - Jim Harrison

Out on the road for a couple of days.

Made the mistake of turning on the radio and they're playing the Top 25 songs of 1978, so I am veering off to maudlinville...the sax solo on Gerry Rafferty's "Baker Street" (so grand, so lonely), Chuck Mangione's "Feels so Good" (wokka, wokka, I'm back in the band room at Nobbern High, the door is open, summer breeze blowing in)...  OK.  No time for old guys mooning (in any sense of the word).  Back at it.  Ooohhh, "Three Times a Lady"!!!!

Doing too much typing, and too little with my family.  But we headed out into the woods the other night and fetched us a trailer load of wood behind the tractor.  Stuff I'd split and stacked with the help of my 8 year-old back in the spring.  Most of it dry enough to keep us warm this winter...that which ain't goes on the far end of the stack to give us a head start on next year.  Way behind on so much, but it looks like we've got wood for the winter, and that's a cozy sight.  And to have my beautiful wife and daughters with me, chonkin' wood...well, it only gives me incentive to type faster and get within sight of caught up.

Sadly the evening ended when I smashed the 8-year-old's finger with a chunk of oak.  A dumb accident and I felt so knuckleheaded.  But she was tough, and despite blood and a bruise, I am told she played her piano beautifully at lessons today.

I will shut down the computer long enough to run up to the big blue tent this weekend.

Tonight, unable to sleep so up here working alone.  Writing about and thinking of a dear friend gone away, and just now Greg Brown's "Tell Me It's Gonna Be Alright" comes on and the sadness and sweetness curl like cold blue smoke through my heart.

This would probably be a good time to thank everyone for their emails.  I love receiving them, I read every single one, but I'm having a tough time answering them...last I checked they were flagged back to January.  So please do drop a note and know I'll see it, it just could be 2010 before I answer.

Pigs are growing like mad, by the way.

A special "hey dere" to Chris, who held down lead guitar duties admirably despite carrying ten stitches in the thumb of his hand.  We sent him home to soak in a vat of Vycodin.  The injury was the result of a freak composting accident.  Seriously.

Well, yes, as a matter of fact.  Nice catch, neighbor..

For perspective: the Olympian I'm writing about ran 26.2 miles at an average pace of 4:55.

Ironically enough, when I was warming up on the sidewalk before the race, I remembered some of the research I'd read in the course of doing the article in which it was stressed that one should run on sand or grass whenever possible to prevent injury and so I moved off the sidewalk into the grass, where I promptly stepped into a hole and cranked my ankle over.  Heard it pop and tear and got that big weak in the guts rush of pain and adrenaline.  Walked for a few blocks, eased back up to running, and managed to do the race, but now I'm sitting here with my leg up and a frozen bag of lima beans strapped to my ankle.

Shoot, and I was preparing to start sorting through all the sponsorship offers.

Never been a big fireworks guy.  Enjoy them, wouldn't necessarily drive across town to see them, although I often do, as we have friends with a great view to the display and it makes for a fine evening of visiting capped by bits of smoldering ash dropping in your Kool-Aid.  And lest I come off as cynical and detached, of course I "ooh" and "aah" along with everyone else - they're fireworks!  This year there were tentative plans to attend, but things changed and we spent the evening in.  This news was received with surprising equanimity by a certain 8-year-old, but apparently it was all false bravado because at 10:02 p.m. I awoke to the sound of distant thumping and nearby weeping, and in the darkness the 8-year-old announced through tears that "The Fourth of July is VERY IMPORTANT TO ME."  I am quite resolute on the point of parent as unbending boss, but in this case I knew of an easy way out, so I took her by the hand and we went downstairs and outside in the dark.  I banged around in the pole barn until I found a ladder and we climbed up on the roof of the chicken coop.  Because it is positioned on the brow of a hill, we had a view to roughly 300 degrees of horizon, and for the next twenty minutes we watched a county's worth of fireworks springing up from the black all over the map.

And the 8-year-old does not know this, but I do have a friend who is a fireworks guy (like, with the tent by the interstate and everything), and he was recently kind enough to hand me a bag of minor sparkle-bangers which I will unveil some enchanted evening.

Soaking in one last look at the Tetons, waiting for a plane, it will be good to see my family at home.

Day-to-day on the homefront I am your standard low-level knuckleheaded grump, going about what I do in hopes that I can keep doing it.  My family does not get the edited and revised version of me.  For them it's rough draft, all the time.  But I am not such a clod that I do not stop a moment now and again and wonder at the blessedness of it all.  How humbling it is to know you do not deserve something but have been given it anyway.

So at one point last night everyone from the youngest toddler to the wind-burned eldest brother gathered around a karaoke machine and sang Neil Diamond's "(Coming to) America."  All those voices, singing in a semicircle around the man and woman who took up everything -- with no guarantee of anything -- and came to this country to work hard and get along.

Neil Diamond, karaoke...you can mine some chuckles there.  But not last night.  What I saw there was simply a beautiful thing.

Congratulations isn't the right word.

Amen, Achiel and Anitta.  Amen.

That needs some polishing, but for now...

A couple of things made me smile during the move.

- I learned for the nth-squared time that my wife is a woman of strength and patience and I thank her again for agreeing to yoke herself to a grumpish knucklehead.

- My mother-in-law and her husband selflessly pitched in and wound up with temporary custody of a generally worthless kayak for their trouble.

- My buddy Mills saved the day with his truck and my brother Jed pitched in by lending his trailer.  This led to a new favorite "Nobbern" story.  We wound up with the right truck, the right trailer, but the wrong size hitch arrangement.  We were looking at half a wasted day, with no time to spare.  So we just drove across the village a couple of blocks to where Ross Johnson (not his real name, but that's the name I used in Population 485) (he had a great quote in there about a pickup truck, a buck deer, and the Packers) and his crew were building a pole barn.  Told Ross my plight and he gave us the hitch off one of his trucks.  Didn't ask where, when, why or how we were gonna get it back, just said take it.  The best of small-town living personified in a 2 5/16th" ball hitch.

- On the way out of town with our first load, Mills and I stopped to pick up Tubby Burgers at TJ's Food-N-Fun.  Had a nice time shootin' the breeze with TJ and a few customers while we waited for our cheese curds.

Things is, I'm not putting New Auburn in the rear view mirror.  No matter where I'm standing at the time I say it, I am from New Auburn.  Of New Auburn.  Plus, there's the all-school reunion coming up, and then Jamboree Days, and, yep, we'll be back, we'll be back... 

(Thanks to these guys for the heads up.)

Current census:

6 laying hens.
1 dead rooster walking.
33 chicks.
2 keets.
3 lambs.
1 goat.
4 pigs.
1 guinea pig.

As I told my sister-in-law the other day, surely we qualify for some sort of government program.  I have a call in to the Department of Agriculture.

Here he is, younger.  Check the strut.

In further news, I got the pig fencing done today.  We're expecting four of them later this week.  I'm quite eager to greet them.

I write a lot about "I" so I should say my wife put in the sweet potatoes today.  She has expanded our garden to dimensions I previously only dreamed of.

I'm home for a stretch, hammering away on my next book, and it's good to see my beautiful family every day.  The baby has officially gone to toddler mode.  I was in charge of her for approximately two-and-a-half minutes today, during which time I left the deck door open and she took a headlong digger including face surfing.  Such howls.  And she hollered too.

Then "Country Boy" by Jimmy Nail.  Been listening to a little of him because it reminds me of England and my dear, late friend Tim.

And by the way.  The misbehavior has continued.  He don't know it yet, but we got us a dead rooster walkin'.

Went to the valley with my 8-year-old daughter to chop and stack firewood yesterday.  We worked right up until the rain hit.  She's a delightful companion on trips like these, pitching right in, lugging chunks of wood, jabbering pleasantly.  I soak it up knowing it won't be long and the old bald guy will be competing with a world of other attractions.  But laughing in the rain as we came back up the hill with a trailerful of next winter's warmth, I tucked the moment behind my heart for future review.

'Course, it was his recovery day, and he was going real slow.

Oh, and I was on a bicycle.

Had company yesterday - family - and it was nice.  Then wound up building a fire pit pretty much on a whim.  Then as long as I had the tractor running, I dragged a big dead oak tree out of the woods and we made a pile of firewood.  It is reflective of certain changes in my life that with spring not even hatched I am looking forward to burning that wood come January because it will remind me of last night, when my wife and two daughters helped with the stacking and we had a picnic lunch on the new grass while the robins sang their evening song.

In the meantime it's raining like sixty, there are turkeys in the yard, and I just had some roasted rice tea which is nice but a tad wan on the heels of a French-pressed mug of fresh ground coffee beans.  I should be more refined.

Cool thing about the rain, it's filling up our rainwater collection system.  I'll have to post some photos of that sometime.  Talked about cobbled together.  One part Menards, one part Farm & Fleet, and one part my scavenger pal Mills.  He's a shameless junk genius.

Tomorrow night (Friday), a new "End Insight" video segment is due to air on Wisconsin Public Televison's Here and Now.  It's about going to an auction.

Big ol' pile of mail and emails waiting.  Gonna buckle down.

Sunny, but dang it's windy.  My brothers were gonna roof a shed today, but my brother Jed told me when they put the first pallet of steel on the forklift, the wind peeled one sheet off and blew it off the stack, into the air, and dropped it right on top of the roof.  While this struck my brothers as a potentially labor-saving approach, they also figured results might be inconsistent and as flying sheets of steel are not conducive to an OSHA-approved work environment, they instead have retired to the shop to work on tractors.

I had called Jed to ask about broadcasting timothy seed by hand.  My brothers are very helpful and patient with me, but I reckon when he snapped the phone shut he and John had themselves a benevolent little chuckle.  I am the oldest brother, and there was this short span of time in the early 1970s when I acted like it, but those days are long gone.

Nice guys, but they never call me to ask about the construction of metaphor or the application of allegory.  

...five minutes have passed.  Had a nice chance to glass the bird, and it was fun to watch the chickens poke their heads out of the shrubbery to blink and scold.  A second vulture came in and made a few passes, and now the one on the corn crib has returned to the air.  The chickens are in the yard, back to scratch and peck. 

And so we did.  Took us a while.  The first kite insisted on nose-diving straight to earth every 20 seconds.  Then we finally got it pretty high in the air and the string snapped.  It floated beautifully down into the valley, where we ran to retrieve it from a leafless box elder.  Then after re-tying it I managed to grab the string while the kite was in flight and slice my finger - this after giving my daughter a stern lecture about why she had to wear gloves (mine were on the ground at my feet when this happened).  When the string broke a second time, we dug around in the shed and found another kite still in the original packaging.  I think it was a gift from a grandma.  This kite was profoundly over-engineered, with a whirly tail and two propellers.  It required quite a bit of assembly, but I gotta say it went better than expected and soon we had it in the air, whereupon almost immediately one of the propellers popped off, sending a key component off into 37 acres of dead grass somehwere.  So we just yanked the propellers and flew it that way.

And up it went, up, up, and away.  Amy had it airborne a good half hour.  My beautiful wife and little baby daughter joined us on the ridge, where it was windy but the sun still kept us warm.  Amy's face was lit up and she was doing little jazz dance moves from her weekly lessons as she fought the kite like it was a feisty northern pike.  When we finally reeled the kite in and Amy and I walked home along the ridge with the sun going lower and the wind moderating, she looked up with that happy-tired look and I thought about the two hours just flown by and what would have been gained at the desk, and man, was I glad I shirked my so-called duties and helped a little girl fly her first kite.  Lucky us, lucky me.

Hoping the sun will nudge the mercury some today, get that maple sap flowing.  We've been getting some, but so far not as much as last year.  It's still running clear, though.  I enjoy making the rounds to empty the pails each day with my daughter.  On cold mornings she pulls the miniature sap icicles from the taps and has herself a country-style popsicle.  Sapsicle, I guess.

Honestly.  If parenting required a license...

But here's the thing:  She picked up her plastic slider dealie, tromped back up the hill, and - weeping the whole time - slid down again.  I the Knothead caught her her safely and - marveling at the durability of tykes - took her inside for supper and to tell Mom. 

Above all, a quiet nod to Ed and Scott and all who serve.

(Captain Smiley and First Lieutenant Salau were climbing on behalf of the Wounded Warrior Project and Camp Patriot.)

I love the game of football.  Loved playing it (in large part for the sanctioned violence, which I still recall with unapologetic fondness), loved watching it.  Then about 2-3 years ago, the afternoon that Randy Moss rubbed his butt on the field goal post, I just got tired of it.  Didn’t storm off or write letters to the editor or anything, but just got weary with the idea that I should burn time watching petulant millionaires act like asses in a time of war.  Or something like that.  I never really polished it into a speech or anything.  And so I just quit watching.  But I absolutely got drawn back in by the run this year.  Only saw a handful of the games, but I truly enjoyed watching Favre in there.  I’m benevolently cynical about this stuff (if one can be such a thing) but he just struck me as a feller who has come to understand himself and his place, and became more likable in the process.  Sports are irrelevant.  Having said that, we have been very fortunate to have a guy that good in place for that long.  Perhaps I can put it best with an overwhelming understatement: He was fun to watch.

But yes.  From the governor right down to the guy at the end of the bar, everyone has released a statement, and the statement is: We Are Sad.

To get an idea of why even the least zealous among us love them Packers, try this excellent essay by Wisconsin writer Paula Sergi.  She says it better than I can, plus the essay contains the phrase, "I had a good feeling about the bra."

Since this video came out, there's been an auction.

Some housekeeping:

- Last year an editor and writer named Kurt Chandler came out to interview me for a magazine piece.  I wound up taking his car keys and driving him to his first Tubby Burger.  The article is out in Volume 121, Issue 4, of The Writer magazine.

- Despite the fact that my storm door is busted and my bathroom floor is banked like turn 4 at Talladega, Milwaukee Home & Fine Living has a little excerpt from Truck: A Love Story on their "In The Neighborhood" page.

Also, we had one for supper Tuesday.

Three songs in a row this morning that worked good for me:

"I Get Ideas" - Louis Armstrong
"I Don't Wanna Grow Up" - Tom Waits
"Live Forever" - Billy Joe Shaver

And now to render me pensive for the 80s, Siouxsie & The Banshees, "Kiss Them For Me."  Gosh.  Sigh.  England in the rain.

Here's the music.  Here's some live footage.  And here's Justin in the studios of 89.3 The Current performing a real stripped down version of "Flume."  Scroll down on this page for tour dates.

I met C. Dale at the 2003 Bread Loaf Writers Conference in Vermont.  What a stretch of days that was.  In spite of (or perhaps because of) my non-academic background when it comes to writing, I cherish the opportunity to spend time in the company of writers who can articulate theory and technique.  You can have your fantasy baseball camp, this was my fantasy writing camp.  While I was an utter dud on the party front, I soaked up every reading and workshop possible, and reveled in day after day of powerful readings.  So it was a blast to check C. Dale's blog today and see this post.  Five years later, these are people I still follow and read.  Such a privilege to share the Bread Loaf experience with them, what fun to see all of those names.

But one thing: Michael Perry did not win the Katherine Bakeless Nason Fellowship in Nonfiction.  I've never been clear on the details.  I did receive a letter of congratulations for winning the fellowship, but literally moments before I was to deliver my reading I was informed that there had been a mixup and while I was a fellow, I was not the Katherine Bakeless Nason fellow.  This is confirmed by my absence from this page (2002 fellows are invited to the 2003 conference).

I am happy to report that I soldiered on, things are going fine, and Bread Loaf remains a fond memory (although I ain't gonna lie -- when I got back home and told the fellers down at the volunteer fire department that I had fumbled the Bakeless, there were bitter, bitter tears).  I wrote a few paragraphs about the experience for Truck: A Love Story.  My editor cut them out of the book, because it is her job to keep me from meandering aimlessly, but right now while she's not watching, here's the excised Bread Loaf bit:

And then, with production humming right along, I abandon the garden again, this time for Vermont , where I spend eleven days participating in the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference.  It was a rare delight for me, to be surrounded by poets and writers and constant talk of writing.  I just wallowed in it.  Went to every reading, went to workshops, did my best to steal tricks from the poets.  I have been rooming with the English novelist Naeem Murr, and we have become fast friends in no small part because he says things like “lashings of oily charm,” and “I would rather have my nipples sanded.”  Among other things, we went jogging where Robert Frost ambled.

The people at Bread Loaf give you your own mailbox and on about day four when I opened mine and found a letter from Anneliese, I felt like a kid at camp, which of course I was.  I rushed home with the letter only to find Naeem in a rare state of discontent.  It seems he had become fixated with a framed vintage photo on our bookshelf depicting (as it said on the back of the print) the hanging of some Wild West outlaw named Black Ted, or Nasty Jack, or Utterly Negative Ned.  I had a look and agreed that the doomed man’s mug creeped me out as well and would impede our growth as artists.  Ultimately we decided that whatever trouble this fellow may have caused in his day, we didn’t want him harshing our vibe in the here and now, and so we turned him to the wall for the duration.  Then I read my letter from Anneliese and shared little bits with Naeem.  Honestly, all that was missing was bunk beds and marshmallow cocoa.  Later when I had a chance to call Anneliese, I found her a little over-stretched.  She was just finishing a state-mandated teaching test in the midst of preparing course material for her fall classes, interviewing babysitters for Amy, signing up for a teaching licensure course and providing care and feeding for a three-year-old.  All complicated by the fact that two nights ago Amy announced with a screech that monkeys were flying in her window.  Now she won’t go in her room alone.  Sometimes when I am off being a Writer in Love, I forget that Anneliese is a single working mom who might like a little help fighting the monkeys.

            There are two hiccups in my Bread Loaf experience, one coming when it is announced during the introduction of my reading that despite what it says in your program, Michael Perry did not win the Katherine Bakeless Prize for Literary Nonfiction (unsure how one responds in such a circumstance, I limited my comments to wondering aloud if this meant I had to surrender my parking space and special pen), and the second today, when – thanks to a delinquent taxi and despite the heroic motoring of a member of the Bread Loaf staff – I arrive at the airport in time to watch my flight home being pushed from the jetway.  In nearly any other circumstance I wouldn’t give a hoot, but I left the conference a day early because John and Barbara are being married tomorrow morning.  It winds up being a long afternoon.  Flying standby, I get the last seat on the last flight out of Burlington , Vermont .  I arrive in Detroit just in time to catch a standby seat on the last flight from Detroit to Minneapolis .  I manage a cellphone call while running the tunnel to make the flight, arrange for a friend to meet me, and wind up pulling into my driveway in New Auburn at the stroke of midnight .

So.  There y'go.  Thanks for a fun post, C. Dale.

It's a rodeo saying, I know, but somehow it just never struck me before, and the way it popped up twice in 24 hours just got my attention, I guess.

I ain't right about much, but I remember the very first time I heard a relatively unkown comedian named Larry the Cable Guy say, "Git'r done!" and I said, that boy's gonna be a millionaire.  With those two-and-a-half words, he tapped straight to the philosophical center of every busted-up-pickup-truck-drivin', volunteer-firefighterin' good-timin' buddy-o-pal I've ever run with, girls included.  Let'er buck! won't make you a million dollars - it doesn't have the equivalent universality - but it appeals to the roughneck existentialist in me.  As much as I like Git'r done! it does not adequately address the fact that even the most resolute combination of brute strength and optimism can get blasted straight to vapor with one swing of the ol' nail-studded reality bludgeon.  Whereas Let'er buck! manages to convey can do, damn the torpedoes, and give my love to mom all in one.  Grit and pluck with a grim fatalistic edge.  Things may go straight to grievous heck, but swing the gate open anyhow.

Let'er buck!

Yessir.

Regarding the tour, I'd like to say we're heaing out in a big ol' Silver Eagle, but it'll be the mighty Plymouth Voyageur, the one with the peeling paint chunks and windshield wipers you run with a standard light switch, like the one in your house.  On or off, no in-between, and if you want the wipers to lie flat, you gotta hit the switch at just the right time.

One of the Long Beds, a guy named Justin Vernon (he recorded, played on, and produced Headwinded), recently signed a deal with a record label for his beautiful album For Emma, Forever Ago.  I couldn't be prouder, but I'm waiting to tell more of the story until the album is officially released next month.  In the meantime, I posted a photo of Justin as a Long Bed on a much warmer day.  Mainly because I wanted to look at a photo of green leaves and water in a liquid state. 

If you read this article, you'll see why I like Justin so much, why I hope he does well, and you'll see how he dresses when it's cold.

Just across the street at the L.E. Phillips Memorial Public Library, Bill Nolte has a show.  Nolte owns Eau Claire landmark The Joynt.  That's him in the first line of Chapter 13 in Truck: A Love Story: "There is a man in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, who owns a bar where he will sell you no light beer."

There's more local art here.