I just found out that my friend Greg Lackner died yesterday. He went into the hospital for the second time this year, and died of liver and kidney failure.

He was a colleague on the radio shows I did with my friends Pam and Ben when I was living in Chicago. He lived close to my apartment, so when I didn’t have a car, he was more than happy to swing by and pick me up when we were both working on the same shows.

He was a good guy, and loved to talk. He did awesome voices for the radio productions, and always had a kind word for me and the work I did, which was appreciated greatly because I was never sure if I was doing alright, or not.

A writer, first and foremost, he was self-employed and hard-working and was enthusiastic about his life in such a way that I was able to draw from it and remember it for when I was feeling enthusiastic about things myself.

He had a loud, gruff-sounding laugh, and had a great sense of humor. He was fair and even-handed about various dynamics that cropped up during the rehearsal process, and was always, always a professional.

He was one of the many things I missed about being in Chicago. I regret not keeping in touch better once I moved away.

I am so sorry he’s gone, and I am having a hard time believing that he won’t be there when I go back to visit.

There was a song on a mix tape my college friend Pete made for me at least ten years ago, and it’s a song I haven’t heard in a long while because I haven’t had a tape deck or walkman that’s worked, and the song was by a band that is, to my knowledge, no longer putting out CDs.

The song is “Sweet Magnolias,” and it’s by a band called The Moon Seven Times. Web pages I have found indicate reunions of the band are possible, but it’s sort of hard to tell, as the pages might have last been updated years ago. Who knows?

At any rate, “Sweet Magnolias” is one of those songs that I committed to memory almost immediately back in the day, rewinding and playing, over and over again, learning every word, every idiosyncratic bobble, the vowel shapes, the places where consonants dropped.

It’s a gauzy song, possibly a seduction, but very much languid, very dreamy. It reminds me of some songs from the 50’s and 60’s, the ones that were incredibly sensual/explicit, a bit raw, but also catchy as hell. For some reason, it makes me think of Solomon Burke’s “Cry to Me,” even though they’re not really similar, stylistically.

The song feels like it is a little bit of me, stretched out over shoegazer strummy guitars and vocals that are so mellow they sometimes go a tiny bit flat. Normally, out of tune singing drives me right up a wall, but here, it’s almost like you’re catching the two vocalists singing, harmonizing in private. Like they’re sitting on a big, wraparound porch, magnolia trees encroaching, and the air is heavy and warm with summer, the moon is making everything flat and blue, there are beads of sweat running down one’s scalp, down the neck, into the collar of a cotton shirt.

I was able to nab a fairly cheap copy of the album on CD off of Amazon or eBay or something, and it was waiting for me when I got home from Texas. I took off the cellophane wrapping and immediately ripped the whole thing to the laptop, bringing up track 10 so I could hear the one song I could play in my head almost perfectly.

And there it was. Guitars, painting dark swirls of midnight blue and blind date curfews around headlights blinking past dark windows in houses, bringing you into the story. A song that does the yearning thing quite well, a song where the slightly off-kilter harmonies have not changed from the multiple times I would try to “listen” to the song from my memory.

This song is the over-tired first blush and rush of being with someone new. You don’t know this person yet, but you are cataloging every piece of them that you can, the feel of the skin on their wrists, their fingers, the way they kiss you, the direction they tilt their head so as to avoid colliding noses. The nights are always too short at this point, aren’t they? The glowing LED clock numbers in the car, the watch on your wrist, the lightening of the sky, the setting of the moon, all reminders that these hours speed by as your lips feel that tingly bruisy-ness, as the back of your neck crackles with goosebumps. Long looks and sometimes idiotic little smiles. Mostly long looks and seriously set mouths, waiting for the next moment of contact, that next long breath that contains all of you and all of them, summer all around, drunken with flowers and dew and moonlight.

It’s so great to have this song again, playable almost any time I want it. It is inebriated love potential, it is the anticipation of being consumed. Mmm.

I’ve been out of town since the 17th, but it feels so much longer than that.

When I first moved to North Carolina, I used to brag to people that my commute to work was a mere three minutes. And it was! I was lucky to score an apartment just the other side of Walnut St. from where Epic Studios is located. I did not take that commute for granted, oh no. There are some mornings that I was positively dragging myself into the test lab, hair practically dripping wet from the shower, because the snooze button temptation was so powerful.

I figured the shorter commute was perhaps an indication that I was moving up in the world - after all, my last desk job in Chicago was only six miles from my apartment door, but it would take anywhere from 45 minutes to 2 hours to get to work. It was a nightmare. I’ve been keeping up with the public transit news since I left, and I shudder to think how I would have been able to get around in the wake of all the budget cuts and the sheer mismanagement by the governor and the downstate legislators in finding solutions for thousands and thousands of city dwellers. The lists that were being published of bus lines being cut were long and scary - and included pretty much every single bus route I ever took to get to work, or to the laundromat, or to the grocery store.

That’s pretty screwed up, I think. As much as I miss Chicago and want to go back to visit, I am actually pretty glad right now I am not living there. The transit system is in jeopardy, and it seems like the powers-that-be don’t care enough at all to help. Awful.

Anyway, my hubris over a 3 minute commute bit me in the ass, as I am now traveling to my newest job, but it currently takes ten hours to make it to the office now. Haha! Sigh.

All the travel is beginning to get to me, but I am trying to stay as calm as I can about it, and do little things to make the process easier. So far, so good. I just hated that I was beginning to get another stupid head cold right as I was flying from California to Texas, and it bloomed on Christmas Eve. So, taking a flight home the day after Christmas was not the most pleasant experience, if only because Mesa Airlines has some of the tiniest, most shabby-looking airplanes ever. We were squeezed into this tiny commuter-style plane for a 3 hour flight, and then I had to change planes in Charlotte, to fly on US Airways proper, and although it was only a 25 minute flight, we had this roomy, well-appointed plane with vidscreens and comfy seats.

I felt ecstatic to be home, honestly. I miss sleeping in my own bed, and I miss my plants and my dishes and my games.  So yeah, I missed my stuff. But I also felt like I was getting some privacy back, some decompression space that I had been sorely missing over the last week and a half. In the hotel rooms, housekeeping is always coming by. There is always someone in the room next to you. Etc.

In Houston, I loved seeing my family, but I hardly got any sleep, and I just wanted some time to clear my head and reflect. I felt like, if I took any time to just relax and zone out, that I would be disappointing them, so I tried to be as present as possible, even though my brain was screaming for some isolation time.

So I have been soaking in the utter happiness of being in this relatively isolated little pod of sunny quiet since yesterday. I have gotten some sleep, knocked out a good deal of the head cold, and I am about to start on laundry so that I can put away my luggage and not have to look at another suitcase for at least a few days.

I think today’s project will be figuring out why I can’t get my laptop to connect to the 360 anymore.

Yesterday I was so out of it. Part of it had to do with a marathon session of trying to get Julia down for the night, and then having to get up a few hours later to watch her so that my brother could take care of some errands. Julia really likes me, I think. She likes to gaze at me, which is something lots of kids seem to like to do for some reason, and she’s no exception now that she’s gotten used to me. She smiles a lot when she sees me come into her line of vision as well, which is pretty damned cool.

She likes lots of silliness, and she likes to be lifted way up in the air. She and I have a pretty good game we play where I make a snickety-clicking noise with my mouth, and she imitates me. We’ll go back and forth, snicking and clacking and then collapsing into giggles. The only game that trumps this one is where she is drooling a lot, and I get her to blow raspberries while my brother is holding her and looking at her. It is a gift that keeps on giving, no lie.

So I was out of it yesterday, and I spent a good portion of the early afternoon passed out on the guest bed. Which sucked. I kept jerking awake and wondering, “Where am I? Oh yeah,” before dropping helplessly into sleep again. I was fully prepared to beg off from Christmas festivities because I was feeling so crappy, but then the scales of Justice clanked into view, menacing and shiny, and my painful head cold suddenly appeared puny in the face of the utter disappointment I’d be facing from my sister-in-law, as well as the utter suckitude of spending Christmas Eve and Day mostly on my own, sick and tired, in someone else’s home, while they were elsewhere, wassailing and watching A Christmas Story over and over and over again.

I sucked it up and showered super-fast and threw a change of clothes into my bag, and we went over to Brandy’s sister’s house, which was huge and almost too perfect-looking, and I got to sleep on an air mattress in their ‘game’ room, after we feasted on spaghetti and eggnog. I slept sort of badly, because of the head cold, and because, well, air mattress, but whatever. The scales of Justice started playing “Hark! How The Bells” any time I started to feel sorry for myself, and I made it through to the morning — which was a chaotic fumbling of gifts and coffee and the seemingly-endless prepping for a Christmas Day turkey that turned out just lovely, with salads and dressing and gravy and a glass of wine that really hit the spot. Oh, and this chocolate pie that was so delicious I almost couldn’t finish it. Very rich.

Overall, I hadn’t done too badly for feeling like crap, even though I am paying for it even more, now. One thing has changed, though, in the last few hours: I am no longer afraid of the Scales that rattle as menacingly as Jacob Marley’s chains, because I am facing air travel tomorrow, and I figure that my karmic backstock will hold for several months on that alone. I fully reserve the right to be utterly cranky by the time I get back home.

Speaking of which, I am experiencing an utterly strange sensation of not having a home, anymore. It’s liberating, sure, but it’s just not something I want to excel at. I really like having a place to be that I can also be at frequently enough to make the rent worth it, you know? I haven’t been in my own bed for over a week, and yet things will be changing again soon, and it’s enough to make me feel cast adrift into the sea of Soon, when a little Now would taste like chocolate-coated divinity.

It’s just weird to have to describe oneself to your brother’s Texan neighbor, by saying, “I lived in Chicago until this past April, when I moved to North Carolina. I now work in California, and I am visiting Houston for the holidays.” More and more, it feels like a roundabout way of saying, “I’m a nomad.”

The church was one of those mega-churches, perhaps not as big as Willow Creek (which I’ve been to, and which horrifies me), but big nonetheless. Raked seating up the back, many rows and sections down on the main floor. Ushers at the multiple entrances, like at an indoor stadium. I half expected them to wear Andy Frain caps, with mini flashlights clipped to their belts.

Anyway. Two big screens, one on either side of a fairly big stage. Gigantic screen at the back of the stage. A rock band sat on stage. Acoustic panels lined the upper reaches of the performance area, aligned with the rest of the audience space.

Oh, lots of carols. With a rock band accompanying. One guy thinks he’s Eddie Vedder, but more clean-cut. Another thinks he’s the reincarnation of Jeff Buckley in a Coldplay cover band. Sometimes, the lyrics to the carols are wrong, or are not synchronized properly between the side screens and the main back screen. Most of the audience members (for that is what they are, here) don’t seem to notice.

The pastor for the church claims that we’re the best service of the day - we’re 5th out of 7 for the night. He gets so enthusiastic about how great we are that he takes photos of the audience, but then gets distracted after covering the first section, and begins to take pictures of the band. He laughs a lot, and clumsily gives a prepared but scattered-sounding sermon about Light = Jesus. So then candles are passed around (which I surreptitiously decline), and are lit from neighbors. By the end of the last carol (we’ve been there twenty minutes, tops), the pastor is thanking us for coming, giving us more safety tips about the candles, and asking that we try to exit left out of the parking lot instead of right, to reduce traffic congestion in the area, and give us a better shot at good gifts from Santa.

And then we were done.

Back when I believed (or whatever that was that I did, because I am not sure I ever believed, really), I was at least impressed by the sense of humility present in a lot of the services I attended. A bit more quiet reflection, a little less AV budget. Cathedrals are still one of my great architectural loves, since they are more than the sum of the hands that put them together, truly. But what we sat in, in too-close rows with indoor-outdoor carpeting lining the floors, was a multi-media theater, with spotlights and resource rooms, and baskets still passed from row to row for what was essentially a very short, very sterile concert.

At the very least, the weather is cool, and I am sleepy and content, if a bit congested. There is a ginormous pile of presents under the tree at my sister-in-law’s sister’s house. I think some of them may even be for me. I can’t really complain.

In blue light nightlight clear and crisp eyes adjust

light so dim, vertical slips up in shadow, profiles are a part of who we are in the nowhere of midnight

she is light as a feather, tears and maa daaaaaaa, hands holding her aloft, holding her tight, swinging her around. she is light and warm, she is just as much as you think she would be, silky hair and eyes reflecting the night light. eyes adjust, the small sounds of shifting, rocking chair situated, bottle at the ready. all, rejected. all she wants right now is to be warm and held, hands patting absently at shoulder, at stomach, at arm, at neck, scritching baby post-REM patterns into my hand with tiny fingernails. oh, the proverbial fingernails of a baby, so sharp, so amazing. life-affirming fingernails.

gravity steps into the room, as silent and clear as the dim night light, as sweet and sudden as a peal of thunder in the distance. there is a moment where julia falls, and she falls like I used to fall in love, she falls right into sleep, and gravity takes hold of her and suddenly she is a teenager, she is an old woman, and her body is heavy, heavier than a sandbag, than a really deep thought by jack handey, and she is asleep, breathing as satisfied as can be the light still dim and me still sitting slightly crookedly in the chair, trying not to move, to jinx it, to change the moment, to keep gravity here until the morning comes.

I am the older sister by two years and nine months. I think we’re about as different as two siblings can be, and yet people who know both of us will tell me that my brother Tyler and I definitely share some characteristics. And yet, despite prompting, those same people will not be able to describe exactly what it is that links the two of us.

Sometimes I feel as if he and I are being tugged by the same cable hooked to our belt loops. The cable that is twisted tightly into tough, sea-faring rope, able to withstand the elements and all manner of physical stress. That cable stretches all the way back into our shared history. We are both nostalgic creatures, even though we show it in different ways.

So I am here in Houston, Texas, visiting him and his wife and their baby, Julia. She is a sweetie pie with a fresh, sweet face. I first met her two nights ago, after my flight got in from California. She was already in her crib - so our meeting was a few hours later, when her cries pierced the air and a very tired Brandy made her way upstairs. I stood at the door to the guest room, waved, and whispered, “Hi! I wanna meet her!” So we made our way into the nursery, and Brandy turned on the lamp and picked up the baby, who was blinking in the light.

“It’s so good to meet you!” I whispered and I smiled at her. She looked a little wary, and then Brandy fed her and snuggled her back to bed, and I went back to the guest room to deal with my West Coast timezoned head.

It took about a day, but Julia has really warmed up to me, and just likes to look at me a lot. When I catch her eye, she immediately smiles. She does this thing when she is sitting up on the floor: she kinda shimmies back and forth on her butt, and waves both hands really fast, when she is really happy. My little brother used to do the same exact thing when he was a baby. It’s funny to see it again.

In the guest room, there are multiple racks filled with tubes of commemorative quarters. My brother is a casual coin collector, only heightened by the fact that he works for a bank. Propped on top of one of two old wooden dressers is a painting my grandmother made of her home in Hamilton, IL. The house has long been sold and renovated by some other family, and Gma herself has been gone for 6 or 7 years now, but the painting reminds me of so many things about myself, and about the Wells side of the family, all-American and yet with its own weird quirks and indulgences and denial and fondness for things past.

It was usually around this time of year that we’d be in Hamilton, anyway: in bunk beds squeaky and old, in a drafty, cold second floor, the window glass wavy and overlooking the river, which glittered at night with bone-shattering cold and distant lights from the Iowa side. It took a long time for warmth to permeate the bedspread layers, but once we were cocooned, we were good until morning.

This year, I am in a house that was probably built within the last five years, with sunshine spilling in from outside, the fan circulating air so it doesn’t feel too warm in this Texas climate. I am older, more tired, still the same kid, but a little better about fighting for a serving of respect and credit for how I choose to live my life. My brother is also the same as he was - still loud, still very presentational, still loyal and hard-working to a fault. Only his voice has changed, really. From squeaky and piercing to deeper and booming.

Back in the day, when things were so crazy and up-ended, what with our parents’ divorce and all the moving and all the money problems and trying to get our lives started, we were dangling from the ends of our cables, limbs flailing, sometimes playing dead so that we wouldn’t swing so wildly in empty space. Now, it feels like we’re both standing, and at times are tugging at the ropes to pull our past lives in closer so that we can contrast, compare, meld.

One of the things I have really enjoyed doing lately is playing Rock Band with Dave and Chad. We’ve gotten much better at the game over the course of several hours of working our way through “In Bloom” and “Say It Ain’t So” a gazillion times each and only one shot at “Sabotage,” because I really never ever need to live down the sheer embarrassment over slaughtering the Beastie Boys so fully. Oh, and we’ve beaten a bunch of other songs into submission, as well, it’s just that a few of them seem like band standards at this point, we’ve done them so often.

I mostly just do the vocals, and Dave and Chad have settled into guitar and drums, respectively, although they used to switch off a bit at first. I haven’t tried the drums at all, and I am OK on guitar and fair-to-middlin’ on bass.

Anyway, it’s a fun game, and we keep ramping up our mad skills so that now we’re ready for induction to the Hall of Fame, but we’re waiting for a night where we have enough time to do these crazy 13-song sets and other challenges. I earned enough money at one point to dress Uncle Tusky in a manner I deemed acceptable: a gother-than-thou girl with an asymmetrical bob (replete with pink streak, to echo my real hair), fishnets, tall lace-up boots, and a PVC-style coat in a deep red. Add to that some gloves with skeleton bones on, some sunglasses, and Joker-style lips, and it felt right and good.

And then we closed out Stockholm on our World Tour, which earned us a city t-shirt. It was such an awesome shirt, as it turned out, that we all decided to don it. Of course, this meant that I had to alter my look just a little bit, so I got a poofy perkygoth skirt, tinted the detail bright yellow to match the ’sweetish’ fish on the shirt, and even though the photo doesn’t show this because I wasn’t quite done yet when I took it, but the hair streak has gone yellow as well. I also have driving gloves now, and bright green eyebrows.

Uncle Tusky is totally bad-ass. Needs a fan club, she does.

The crappy part about being the girl that played video games all day (and got paid for it) was the gigantic black hole that all of my free time fell into.

Social life? Ha.

Chores? Ha.

Bills? Hahahahaha, oh crap, it’s time to pay rent again?

By the time I was able to extricate myself from the horrid clutches of crunch time (we had just gotten through the last disc build for the PC version of Unreal Tournament 3), the damage was done. My apartment was a time capsule, circa April 2007. Dust coated every surface. Small spiderwebs spun across most of the out-of-the-way corners. The stack of video games I played for fun got taller as I found excuses to make purchases, but possessed no actual time to play them.

In many ways I found the crunch rewarding, as most workaholics can attest: there’s a certain rush you get from over-extending your life past the breaking point and still making huge milestones on a project, a smile plastered grimly to your sleep-deprived face. There is comfort in the fact that you are essentially cut off from the world. If you’re night shift, like I was, even better: no one can get pissed that you didn’t make their birthday party or whatever. You don’t have to feel lame about not having a date for this Friday.

Your lover is a keyboard/mouse, baby, and don’t you forget it.

So, in the weeks since then, as I’ve been flying thousands of miles on my new commute to the new job, I’ve managed to make a tiny dent in the neglect inflicted on my life with UT3 crunch. But it’s a fearful wall that I face, a wall of never-ending laundry and book reading and item purging and various little artsy projects that have been languishing since I waved goodbye to Chicago.

Today was the worst. I hit today running, and I did tons of laundry and tidied things up, put things away, cleared dust off the tops of things that aren’t even visible to most people around my height. But it’s now just past midnight here on the East coast, and I feel as though I have accomplished nothing. I know I have, because I can see some of it, but the anxiety of the approaching holidays hit me square between the eyes, and I couldn’t quite grasp any emotional centering.

I texted Chad, and he came right over to hang out with me, and we had shakes from Cookout, and I had a cajun chicken sandwich that was quite tasty, and we watched a couple episodes of Black Books, and then some movie trailers, and I am so, so glad he is my friend and that he is here. I was able to come back down to Earth from my perch on high, where I was a tiny, chattering monkey, screeching at the real me down below. The anxiety slowed itself to a dull crawl, I re-checked my luggage as Chad and I yammered about Picross, and I realized that today was actually quite productive, and I need to stop selling myself so short all the time.

Tomorrow a new sort of crunch commences for me, and then a far-away Christmas, and then more craziness, and then, hopefully, even more great changes in my life that will mean much upheaval and adjustment, but also heralding in the new era of job satisfaction in my life.

As long as I can keep the furniture dust-free, I should be alright. Right?

Because I am a nomadic being at present, I forget things about the various places I am inhabiting, such as the fairly severe lack of precipitation in this section of North Carolina. So serious is the dry spell here that Durham County is officially on watch with regards to water usage. There’s less than two months’ water for the area to live on. As part of a measure to conserve the reserves, businesses have been asked to implement certain practices so that their water usage is drastically reduced.

So, my currently jet-set brain is why it took me several seconds of durr and a reminder from my friend Nova as to why our coffee and hot cocoa arrived in Styrofoam to-go cups as we sat brunch at Brigs this morning. All around us, patrons pushed their pancakes around on plastic plates. We wondered why we had proper silverware, in spite of all the disposables, but no sense could really be made of it. I am sure the dish-washing is at a minimum there, at any rate, so Nova got the Egg Nog french toast, and I got a fairly tasty smoked salmon Benedict, and we yammered about ARGs and cats and stress, and I tried not to smirk at the plastic cup of water I was sipping from.

Nova is also borrowing my copy of The Orange Box for the 360, so she’ll hopefully find out the truth about cake in short order.

It was a little weird to see the first real sign of the drought today spelled out in disposable dishes, since outside, I can hear the gutters pinging with the first real rain we’ve had in ages. Just in time? I hope.