A History in Rust

More things people said that I found to be really funny:

"Oh! You have pants on! Did you go outside today?" -JM

"I'm tired of girls being in love with vampires. The end." -Eric

"The Internet is not big enough for both of us." -JM

"We may have, and I don't want to jump to conclusions here, but we may have just ridden a tandem bicycle into a shit hurricane." -Eric

"Do you ever daydream when you're falling asleep?" -JM
"Um...yeah, that's just called dreaming." -Eric

"She is totally a lesbian, and I totally am not." -JM

"My ex-boyfriend has a new girlfriend AND a new cat. He moves fast." -Nona

"Dude, I got some bad news." -Eric
"Yeah?" -JM
"Spectacle Rock is an entrance to death." -Eric
"Oh." -JM

"Take a hint from the rabid success that is JM Huscher." -Ankur

"THAT was mush. THIS is stew!" -JM"

One of my students was writing a Hungarian rap during English class (instead of taking a test). I confiscated it specifically so I could transcribe it and post it for you guys. I'm going to be working on it all day tomorrow.

click to enlarge

I have been road tripping all over Hungary selling this English instruction book. My employer, the book's publisher, puts on these teaching "seminars" where teachers go and get a free little bag, free coffee and food, and have to sit in on a presentation about how awesome this book is. I hate this idea for several reasons:

1. This is cultural imperialism at its worst. I am an American, therefore I am supposed to know more about how to teach English than these people who have been doing it for 30 years? I'm an American, and I speak English "without" an accent. But I'm not teaching them pronunciation. I'm supposed to be telling them how to do this job.

2. It's a total bait and switch. "Here's a present... Oh wait! Listen to our sales pitch!" You know how sometimes Christians do "free concerts" that turn out to be revival meetings with big scary alter calls at the end? That's what this feels like. Speaking of Christian Rock Concerts, have you guys seen this? It's the new Stanky Leg.

3. I am singing the praises of a book that I have never used and never will. I don't like the book. I get around this in the presentation by saying "A book should have this and this and this. If it doesn't, it's not a good book, and you shouldn't use it."

I do it for the money, and it doesn't feel like selling out. I treat the teachers who attend with respect. I encourage them. The pay is decent, and I get to see the weird little villages that I otherwise wouldn't get to. I have my last out-of-town one on Thursday, and then a large group presentation (100+ teachers) here in Budapest. Eric's coming to that one. Should be interesting.

Oh well. Another one added to the long and weird list of jobs I've had.

2009! What an amazing year for music!

Mono put out one of the best instrumental albums I've heard in years. Grizzly Bear is (still) at the top of their game. Karen O wrote an album of kids music that's so good, I'm willing to consider having some of my own. Monsters of Folk lived up to the hype, and there was a lot of it.

I made zero effort to pay attention to hip hop this year, and thank God. I could barely handle how great the rest was. I was thinking about getting my top ten albums of 2009 list ready, but this year it's going to be tougher than ever. I already chopped a bunch, but the rest of these all have redeemable qualities. How am I supposed to whittle this down to just ten?!

* =contending for top honors

Mono - Hymn to the Immortal Wind*
Mercury Program, The - Chez Viking
Riceboy Sleeps - Riceboy Sleeps
If Trees Could Talk - Above the Earth Below the Sky
Do Make Say Think - Other Truths
Volcano Choir - Unmap
Grizzly Bear - Veckatemist*
Karen O and the Kids - Where the Wild Things Are OST*
Yeah Yeah Yeahs - It's Blitz
Bird, Andrew - Noble Beast
Monsters of Folk - Monsters of Folk
Dirty Projectors - Bitte Orca
Decemberists, The - The Hazards of Love
Bishop Allen - Grrr...
Conor Oberst and the Mystic Valley Band - Outer South
Callahan, Bill - Sometimes I Wish We Were an Eagle*
Wilco - Wilco (The Album)
UUVVWWZ - UUVVWWZ
Modest Mouse - No One's First and You're Next*
Them Crooked Vultures - Them Crooked Vultures
Earle, Steve - Townes
St. Vincent - Actor
Sonic Youth - The Eternal
Mountain Goats, The - The Life of the World to Come
Mastadon - Crack the Skye
M. Ward - Hold Time
Jay Z - The Blueprint 3
Built to Spill - There Is
Diane, Alela - To Be Still

OK. What's missing?

This is sort of a weird post. Sorry.

I am always amazed and impressed at the strength of this very dysfunctional, very beautiful poetry family that I belong to. Recently, my poet-friend (brother? half-brother? step-uncle?) Doug just became a dad. The Facebook photo albums were full of other poets crowding around Doug's little monster. When Kat (a poet) and Jack got married, I know a lot of poets showed up there, too. Of course they did. That's what family does. I dig that. I dig that a lot.

I wasn't at the wedding, and I didn't hold the baby, but I've hosted a whole bunch of you dudes on my couch. I've fed you delicious food (except for Blair, whom I almost killed with an undercooked pizza). I've booked you shows that you didn't show up to. I booked you for shows that didn't pay enough. I gave you a hundred car-rides to Omaha and back. I convinced you not to kill each other, even when I wanted to kill you. I let you drink my whiskey.

And sure, there are folks who blog every other week about how they need you to paypal them 20 bucks because they don't want to get a real job. Every family has a weird cousin that shows up at Thanksgiving, waves at Grandma, and then spends the rest of the afternoon stuffing hot rolls in his pockets. We're not here to knock that cousin. He's still in the family, and he can have all the hot rolls he wants. That's what a family is. It's give and take.

Lately, I've been thinking about how and when I'll be returning to California. I'll need a teaching job, and the education job market is a joke right now. CA cut 2 billion from the state education budget last year, and a lot of people were let go. Schools aren't doing a whole lot of hiring these days, so I'll need all the help I can get. It's nice to know what I've got in my corner. I plan on sending mail (not mass mail) to my Bay Area family (a quick Facebook count puts that number at around 50) in January and February, asking them to keep their eyes peeled for education work.

Let me just say, in advance and retrospect, that I am incredibly lucky to have you all in my life.

There was a long debate about whether or not I should post these, especially since my mom reads my blog and (I'm pretty sure) so do a bunch of other people who have relatively high opinions of me. They probably don't need to be privy to the things I yell about in the apartment (i.e. poo). Still. Some of these were too funny not to post. Sorry mom, et. al. I'm also including other people in the quotes now. Anything you say to me or near me can and will be used to prove that my friends are hilarious.

"You're standing on my Internet." - Eric

"A bad haircut isn't a [expletive] social statement. It's just a bad haircut." - JM

"Third wheel? JM? Great Soviet cock block!" - Nick T.

"If I went to war with you, I would invent a gun that shoots polar bears as the projectiles in rapid-fire mode. I would use that gun against you. Then I would win a glorious victory." - Jim O.

"Stab others more than you get stabbed." - Jarred R.

"I thought my kidneys were wrecked. Turns out I was just binge drinking." - JM

"Whoever awarded that beer a blue ribbon should be shot." - Mike H.

"I'm [expletive] jealous of your Bulgarian lentils." - Katie F. [not a metaphor]

"There was an attractive jam." - Eric [when two cute girls pushing carts clogged a grocery store aisle]

"The universe is an explosion. It does not have to listen to anyone." - Jeff D.

"Congratulations on those ten consecutive chin-ups, no mean feat for a man of your advancing age." - George W. [to me]

"That poop was so big, I almost named it and started a college fund for it." - JM

"Columbus, go home!" - Robert E.

Eric Mellow is totally the man.


Nice. NICE!

Yesterday, I did a load of laundry, and about 20 minutes in the washing machine started blasting dirty water all over the bathroom floor. It was coming out of the top of the machine, which was at this point, shaking violently and making weird scraping noises. I ran in to shut it off, then stood there like an idiot for awhile before I decided to hand rinse my clothes in the bathtub and hang them to drip dry on our wooden drying rack.

Then this morning, I went to make coffee, but I was so tired I forgot to put the pot under the spout, and in about 10 minutes, there was wonderful smelling coffee all over the kitchen. I suppose this could have happened anywhere, but I'm also inclined to think that an American coffee maker would have had some sort of safety latch that would have offset my stupidity.

I am (apparently) flood-prone.

I barely raise an eyebrow at this sort of thing anymore. I mean, things going hilariously wrong has just become so completely normal that I can't afford the energy of getting all worked up about any of it. And I think part of me knew this is what I was getting into.

Eric, on the other hand, had no idea. Still. He rolls with the punches like a champ, and there are a lot of punches to roll with. It's safe to say that I wouldn't be surviving any of this without him.

I just read a really great poem by my favorite Magpie, and I was thinking about memorizing it in case I ever wanted to cover it. I read it through several times, wondering how (or if) I should change the line about the "bra," and whether or not she (Magpie) would be OK with this. And then it occurred to me that I don't have any readings to go to for quite awhile, and that I might not ever do a poetry show again.

This didn't bother me as much as I think it could have.

I haven't made a serious effort to write poetry in several months, and, to be honest, I don't miss it. Prose feels new and fresh and full of possibility. I realize that poetry is equally full of possibility, but it sometimes feels like a formula. This is especially true of the last three "slam" pieces I wrote, including the one that Danny and I performed on finals stage. I am learning so much with prose, which is always the goal. It's challenging--it feels like trying to steer a rowboat through a hurricane. I don't know if what I'm doing is successful, but I'm fighting and fighting to make it work. I love that about it.

Is it good? I don't know. Perhaps as a result of my having submitted prose work to a bazillion journals, I've gotten more negative feedback on my prose (in the form of rejection letters) than I ever got in the years I did poetry. This weekend I got letters that told me I use too much cliche, take too long to get to the point, and generally avoid "action" like the plague. I got harsh, negative reactions to my poetry, too. But not this much, and not all at once.

It will be interesting to see what happens.

Just thinking out loud.

This week was rough. Rolling with the punches is starting to feel like getting beat up. Still, nothing cures what's ailing you like a whole bunch of major chords on acoustic instruments. Look. I know it's nothing amazing, but sometimes you take what you can get. This week it was a little bluegrass:


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_eE_XX5t-DQ

Love and miss you all.

A list with statistics.

1. I found a little extra work doing presentations (in English) for a publishing company. I get to travel to some smaller villages across the country and they pay pretty well for me to talk about education for 45 minutes. I sort of feel like an imperialist telling foreigners to do stuff the way we do.
Pictures of Vespas in my presentation: 6

2. I have friends in a ska band called Bottlerocket who sent us an instrumental track. My roommate Eric (with whom I share this 279 square foot one-room apartment) and I used it to record a song about all of the stuff in our room. I might be the worst singer ever. Look for a music video soon.
Number of Velociraptors in the song: 1

3. I finished Dave Eggers You Shall Know Our Velocity and Steve Martin's The Pleasure of Our Company. Both were more or less OK. The latter had some incredible moments, including the last line of the book (no spoilers): "there were still many takers for the quiet heart." That's one of the most hopeful things I've heard all year.
Non English-Teaching Books in my house: 5

4. Chapters from my book are being picked up left and right (and left again--a third chapter got accepted yesterday), which makes me feel pretty good. It's been mostly smaller literary mags (with impeccable taste) at this point. The book as a whole is coming along, too. I had been stuck on one part for the last five days, writing and deleting over and over again. I think I figured it out this morning.
Current publishing batting average: .375

Somedays I feel big. Some I don't. I bend and break. It's always the same, I guess.

Love and rockets.

- JM

Real conversations Eric and I have had in the last four days:

"Was there a football game yesterday?"
"It still is yesterday, dude. Wait. No it's not."

"I can't see that girl, but I bet she's cute."

"It's already over a minute, and we don't even have a theme song yet."

"Have you seen the Parliament at night?"
"No. I mean, I saw a picture of it."
"Yeah. It looks like that."

"Hey. Check it out. Hogwarts."

"This is the most food of all the food I've made so far."

"It's all about who you know, and you don't know anyone."

"Is it possible that we are cock-blocking ourselves?"
"Dudes do that all the time. It's called AXE."

"I think there's a difference between what I'm --"
"POOP!"

"When are women going to realize that I don't care about them?"

"I know where to go to hang out with Americans. It's called America."

"They don't own the night. No one does."*
*quoting a TV show, but we've said this so many times in the last week that it had to be on this list.

Here's another chapter that I just "finished." It happens pretty early in the book. This story is about my little brother and me, and so I have to say the following: I have offered and still owe a thousand apologies to Mike, who was on the receiving end of a lot of violence while we were growing up, and who became an outstanding dude in spite of it. He is a bigger person than I am.

I won't pretend that the web is a reasonable place to publish something of this length (over 2,500 words), but no one's forcing you to read this now are they? There won't even be a quiz. OK. No more editorializing. Let's do this.

( On the Bigness of Dinosaurs )

Sorry for the Internet silence! I was submitting stuff to journals. Fifty-seven of them. I'm getting the rejections back slowly, and I'm saving all of them for some sort of writing project on failure. Should be interesting. Some of them are really kind. Others are just plain rude. One of them had the phrase "like totally LOL" in it.

I submitted mostly prose, but I also took the time to submit cover artwork to one magazine. I was pretty happy with the results:


[click image to enlarge]

One more thing: Happy Halloween! Don't forget to upload your amazing costumes to facebook so I can see them!

For my amusement only... Here is a mostly complete list of all of the literary mags I have submitted to in the last several weeks. I have 100 more mags on my list to look through, and probably another 30-40 submissions to work out from that list. Anyway, here they are in no particular (or a vaguely opposite alphabetical) order:

( under the cut )

In about three hours I'm headed out to the airport to pick up Eric Mellow, who will be living with me in the tiny apartment, and sharing in all of my European adventures. Let me tell you something, his first day in the country (Friday) will be a doozy.

I do not work tomorrow because October 23 is a national holiday. It commemorates the anti-Soviet revolution of 1956. On the 50 year anniversary (in 2006) there were massive protests against government corruption. And when I say "massive," I mean "violent mobs taking over the streets." Protesters were torching cop cars, and some of them even got their hands on a tank (for crying out loud). The entire Parliament (about 20 minutes walk from my house) was a war zone. The cops came out in full riot gear with water cannons and tear gas and beat some heads in. There has been rioting in some capacity every year since. By the most conservative accounts, the streets will be full of cops. By the most liberal, I should leave the country for a few days. I am not overstating it. Several people have actually recommended this.

And here's where all of my sensible friends would say things like "lock yourselves in your apartment and don't come out." To those friends I say... we'll keep a safe distance. And to Eric: Here's to hoping no one gets a baton to the face during your "Welcome to Budapest Party." Nothing cures jet lag like a tear gas grenade. Lace up your running shoes, we're going out in search of riots.



You wish your life was this exciting.

My grandpa is pretty awesome.

He sings a lot of old weird folk songs these days including "If my nose was full of nickels, I'd blow it all on you." He used to sing this one too, and tomorrow I'm teaching it to my sixth graders, who are learning all of the different names for different family members. We haven't ever had a whole lot in common, and even this isn't much. Still. I'll take it.

With (sadly) minimal western flair, courtesy of some really cheesy dude with a bad haircut:


I am my own Grandpa.

Something I've been working on...

( November 1991: Waiting for the 14 )

Held this in for as long as I could stand it...

BEN NELSON IS OUT OF HIS EFFING MIND.

I don't have time to list all of my Nebraska friends who don't have or can't afford health insurance, but you know who you are. I was one for almost six years, and a single night in the hospital landed me over $12,000 in debt. I lived in constant fear before and after that incident of ever getting sick at all. I refused to go to the doctor when I should have. I had fantastic pain that I just lived through. I needed help, and I couldn't get it.

Ben Nelson has the opportunity to help us by voting with his Democratic Colleagues, and he's spitting in our faces, citing the need for a 60 vote majority on this bill. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. He needs to do the right thing even if there are only 50 other senators doing it. Allowing states to opt out of a public option is an unacceptable. This is not the time for compromise. We've waited too long.

If you live in Nebraska, you need to call the Benator right now: (202) 224-6551.

We're going to assume for a second that there will be no people on this list. Today I specifically missed Sean Conlon and my little brother and Ankur Patel and several others. Everyday it is someone new, breaking my heart and fixing it all at once. Here is an incomplete list of things I do not miss as much as I miss you people.

1. Black Beans. I can't find them dried, in a can, and haven't even seen them in food anywhere. How can a country not have black beans?! How could you do that to me?!

2. Soy Milk. Fail. I realize I'm off to a bad start by only listing food here, so I'll also get these out of the way: frozen burritos, Mac 'n' Cheese, cheddar cheese, chai tea, portobella mushrooms (gotta be here somewhere), and a few other things I can't think of at this exact second.

3. My bike / bike lanes. I wouldn't ride a bike in Budapest if I had one. The drivers are nuts, and almost no one in this town is capable of talking about bikes for more than two minutes before mentioning a horrible wreck they have seen. There are bike lanes, but they're interrupted by parked cars too often to be taken seriously. I miss my bike. I miss it a lot.

4. Netflix / Hulu. For someone with as many down hours as I have had lately (mostly waiting for the lentils to finish cooking), Hulu would really be handy right about now. So would Netflix. Both are banned by some sort of international copyright blah blah blah.

5. Guitars and Pianos. I should be able to get my hands on a guitar this week. I'm hoping. I made an arrangement with the school, and they're going to let me use the baby grand in the chemistry room. I haven't touched anything for almost a month. I am itching.

6. Vespas. Sad but true. I could survive being away from "Lucrezia," which is the name I come closest and closest to settling on for my '78, if there were other 60s and 70s models on the streets. So far, and yes, I've been keeping track, I've seen 7 PK50XL scooters*, which at their earliest were manufactured in 1985 and at their latest in 1990. Nothing earlier than that, though. It's almost the same, but it's not. It's like someone offering you naan when you want a tortilla.

The list is long, but I assure you I am still doing better than worse. Money is a little tight, but I should come out of October alive. The book is coming along well, and I feel less and less like a tourist every day. Time is flying.

*Scooter Nerd Moment:
You'd be hard pressed to find one of these in the states as US import laws banned 2-cycle scooter imports in 1985, before this scoot was born. The PK50XL was manufactured while Piaggio (Vespa) developed designs for its cleaner 4 stroke engines, imported to the US in and after 1993.

My language student canceled today, so I spent the day running around with some kids from Alaska. We went to Hero's Square and then to the Varosliget before taking the subway for this view of the Parlament and then climbed the hill for this view of The Chain Bridge. The whole trip, mostly on foot, took us about four hours.

My city is beautiful.

In unrelated news: Yale is offering podcasts of lectures from several courses online for free HERE. I'm taking an econ class on Game Theory and a Philosophy course on death. I am wicked excited about both of them.