meeting

yesterday at work i met some people from middle eastern iowa. they asked me if i knew where a particular lake was in winconsin. i told them i wasn't sure, but i was sure that since they were shocked i hadn't heard of it and that the most notable lake in the area is very difficult to mistake for anything other than the sea, they had the wrong part of the state. they had heard of some of the flooding that had gone on in wisconsin and i guess that as long as they were there it seemed like a good idea to try to catch the spectacle, which, incidentally has all but passed. they asked if it had really been bad at all and i accidentally stumbled in acting as an instrument to fill in the gaps of the story. i gathered that the lake they were looking for was not lake "Dalton" but lake "Delton" from the fact that they had heard it crossed its banks a bit. in fact the lake broke clean through, emptied itself out in the Dells and damn near took the city with it. the same rains forced rivers and lakes up all over southern wisconsin and i remember one paper that had a full page picture of about a half mile stretch of I-94 under water. my fellow iowans had no idea of any of this, and i wonder if they knew how flooded their own state had been. for some reason their ignorance made me uncomfortable and i neglected to mention that i was also from iowa, perhaps from fear that they might mistake me for a comrade willing to show them around. instead i found myself hustling them out, somehow hurt by their apparent total absence of mind in the past two months. i told them that they were probably looking for the Wisconsin Dells, which were an hour-or-so west and in the middle of the state but failed to mention that when they got there they would find neither Lake "Dalton" nor Lake Delton.

sheesh

i would just like to take this moment to remark that sufjan stevens is the positively best thing going on in music. i mean, honestly.

blog for blog's sake

clearly as regards my life style in recent months blogging has not fit very well into the intinerary. i do apologize to anyone who may have been interested enough in my life and creativity to check the posting. and as regards such things some of you may have noticed that the title of this blog has changed. i can offer no explanation, but hope that you find it to your liking and that it is not too baffling. as some of you know i find it somewhat bad manners for a writer (not to say author) to discuss work and particulalrly ill advised to discuss titles. hence the lack of explanation. suffice it to say it's really not that important anyway.

but as i was saying, as regards my life, my posts are, habitually, few and far between. and as impolite as it may seem, i find it an effective means of warding off regular readers (that's a good thing, right?). i hope you'll forgive me. the fact of the matter is i can't write very quickly, but have to sort of let things ferment for a while before they can become any kind of presentable anything.

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if it was a hard winter in Wisconsin it's been an equally hard summer. the rains have forced rivers and lakes beyond their borders and into peoples yards, basements, and in some severe cases into altogether taking their homes. Holly and i live in a pretty high area but last month when we went up north for vacation we were forced to find roads that weren't under water in order to get there. but once there the result was beautiful. the majority of the rain and the real flooding has been in the southern state but there was a noticably greater quantity of water up north as well. the lakes were swollen to the banks and docks either hovered just above the water or dove beneath its surface. an elderly man at a bait shop informed us that it had been a particularly dry year and we were obliged to think that, to him, every year was a dry year and nothing could make this change. if a number of people's piers were six inches under water, well then those people must have just built them that way. and maybe as regards his more expansive memory he's right. the only evidence I can offer to the contrary is that in four years time i have never seen the water that high. but then four years isn't a very long time.