The Best Laid Plans

For a while I had no inclination to blog, but now I have much inclination but too many directions to take. I don’t know where to begin, how to filter out each concern. I want to address the malaise that seems to plague all of my friends in the arts. I want to muse about life and hope and fellowship and wanderlust and Howard Shore. Where do I begin?

Wisconsin.

This coming weekend, I’m going to Wisconsin for about a month. Juliet is taking a portrait workshop and I have much studying to do in other fields, so I am sharing a rented cabin with a couple of art students. Since one of the people backed out of the workshop and the others have to split the difference whether I go or not, I get to stay for free in exchange for acting as chauffeur and chef (I think).

Essentially, I am still a vagabond, a Bohemian companion, a warrior bard. I’ll start teaching piano lessons and working once I get back in August. For now, it’s Wisconsin on a shoestring.

I’m reasonably happy about it, because for a while I was utterly convinced that I wouldn’t be able to go at all. I was resigned to the reality of being alone and stressed for up to eight weeks. Things are still pretty tenuous, though, and the best-laid plans of mice and men go oft awry.

I good friend of mine from grad school lives in Wisconsin, and I hope to visit him while I’m in the state, but I don’t even know what part of the state he lives in. Come to think of it, I don’t even know what part of the state I will be staying in. But I intend to visit him.

After the workshop, we’re going to visit Minneapolis for a few days. It will be just like our visit at the top of December, sans frostbite.

And on the way back, I’ll be hitting the City of Fountains. The special lady won’t be with me because I’m dropping her off somewhere for a few days during that time, but around the end of July I will be carousing with my rat pack in Kansas City. And then we’ll return to Austin.

Leave all the mice and men to their schemes; I have my own, however awry they may go. This is happening. I thought it wouldn’t, and then I salvaged the whole thing, and I’m not going to let it dissipate again.

I want to see my friends again, and so I will.