Category: General

Dear ______ ,

One of the things I like the most about Easter is that it’s a floating holiday, a movable feast following the first full moon after the vernal equinox.

Last year we followed the Paschal full moon through the Jemaa el-Fnaa, Marrakesh’s main square and one of the most lively, head-spinning places I’ve ever been. The square is home to all kinds of sensory stimulation, as described in the liner notes to this particularly sublime Sublime Frequencies release:

By day it serves as a venue where magicians, fortune tellers, herbalists, acrobats, monkey handlers, snake charmers, dentists, astrologers, numerologists, and sorcerers create intriguing displays of bewitching spectacle. By night, the square transforms into a symphony of mystical brotherhoods and night musicians…

We didn’t have near enough time to properly explore Morocco or join any mystical brotherhoods, but the walk to our Riad in the video above encapsulates the suspended mania and fleeting quiet moments that made up our week there, which preceded travels in Portugal, Spain, France, and Germany before moving back here last May.

This April, I’m joining Jennifer on a different kind of journey. As I may or may not have already told you (we’ve been trying to do so in person as much as possible), we’re expecting our first kid in just two weeks. Jenn has been feeling well and we are both excited.

Friends have asked me how expecting a child has changed my perspective, and the obvious answer is that I haven’t experienced anything yet. But on a small level, I do feel somehow reinvested in the species, as if re-attuned to the values and qualities of childhood, such as curiosity, openness and an appreciation for life.

(Of course, the spring weather plays a part in that as well.)

One of the biggest reasons we feel confident that we’ll be able to do a decent job parenting is the support, warmth and wisdom passed on to us by our family, friends and colleagues. For that we are extremely grateful.

The next two weeks will be interesting. We’ll be sure to keep in touch, and I look forward to seeing or hearing more from you soon.

sincerely,

LDHW

Riding my bike into KCMO the day after I get back, taking stock of the city and how much and how little it has changed. The laundromat on 43rd street has finally closed, most likely remaining in operation right up until the last of its 50 washers and driers finally bit the dust. The tattooed crowd outside the tattoo shop have not died of nicotine poisoning just yet. Blockbuster Video is somehow still in business, and the Westport covered wagon looks as regal and ready-for-takeoff as ever. Streetside has closed down but the red neon lights above the door are still turned on, as if the building is not yet ready to relinquish the life it once contained. Bikers in KC are much less rigid than those in Germany, making lazy figure eights across Westport road before picking a side street to pedal down. Two fat women in floral print dresses waddle out of Rudy’s taqueria, shouting to each other in voices that have only grown more hoarse over the last three or four decades. Crooked sidewalks with grass and weeds growing between them, the smell of freshly mowed lawns and truck exhaust. When visiting friends you don’t have to search for people’s name plates or doorbells on apartment buildings, you just park your bike and walk right up to their front doors. Dropping by unannounced isn’t done very much anymore, but I have an excuse as long as I don’t have a cell phone. There aren’t any bike lanes, but if you cheat on the traffic signals you can break ahead of the traffic and for a few glorious moments glide down the middle of the smooth paved streets until your survival instincts prompt you to front wheelie it up onto the sidewalk.

Napping… without any church bells to mark the hours. Waking up and hitting the wordpress after seven months in Chateau D’If.

Now I’m back in Kansas and it’s time to get back to business. I have not posted here in the last few months for two main reasons. One, I did not have routine Internet access. Two, I was not sure exactly what to post in the first place.

In the past I have written about my life and travels in an amusing and somewhat journalistic fashion. This is what I did, this is something you should listen to, here are some photos and captions. All the time writing what are likely much more interesting or at least experimental things in various notebooks, loose sheets of paper, the walls of my sequestered, high-security compound.

It’s time to come out of the closet.

What I mean is there is no point in posting personal writing if it’s not going to be somewhat personal, no point in squirreling away the only nuts that might be worth hatching. But personal as in what I had for lunch is quite boring, and you can always get that on twitter. Persona as in the various modes and moods we all pass through each day, the in-between states in which actually interesting writing arises.

Of course blogging is all an experiment, and I must admit to being currently under the heavy, heady influence of the likes of Bernard Soares (whose city and dream states I just visited) and Joe Joubert (whose writing and nasal bridge I admire). I plan to vary the length of my posts but remain consistent in the frequency with which I post — daily, at least during the week, and sometimes probably more. The photos of Natalya Bond aka Jennifer Wetzel will still play a big part.

Please post comments, and feel free to be as contentious, uncomplimentary or long-winded as you like. I’m not posting on behalf of my ego, so you don’t need to comment just to tell me something is well-written if you don’t feel like it. On the other hand, I’m posting almost entirely on behalf of my ego, so I plan to be as arty and pretentious as possible when the occasion arises.

In conclusion, it’s good to be back in the Midwest, to be working in newspapers and publishing again, to have a high-speed connection between the inside and the outside worlds. I’ve always compared blogging to peering into and looking out of windows, so I’ll most likely be talking and linking back to you as well.

Love from Westwood, and good to see you again.

LW

My home state celebrated a big birthday today. Kansas is now one-hundred and fifty years young. Even though I suspect it has been around a lot longer than that. Just ask Juan de Oñates, who in the early 1600s referred to the native Kansans Escansaques, “the troublesome people.” Not much changes, I suspect. And also thank Case Seward for this centennial illustration of the opportunities that await you once you make that decision to don a garland of sunflowers.

See you all in Kansas sometime soon. Meanwhile, more vintage KS postcards here.

Who among us does not harbor the suspicion that maybe the most beautiful things we’ve seen in our lives have been already (and perhaps were almost instantly) forgotten? The impressions made so delicately they did not create the friction needed to make an imprint. Maybe all of our stories — poems, memories — emerge from a darkness that we at all times (silently, unknowingly) have access to. The act of shining a light requires both inspiration and courage. Uncover what you may, while you are able.