October Country, Hulk Is Old, Baby Published Again: More News at 11:11

Well, as advertised, Baby is on The Very Serious And Most Professionally Important Academic Job Market (TM). She is rocking the house. She also just had her most recent manuscript of poems, a li'l chipbook (mini chapbook) accepted for publication some time late this year. It's a sextet of sestinas called "The Kissing Number". Hulk is reminded of jazzercizes that really good musicians do, setting challenges for themselves when the art form itself is not enough; like playing Coltrane's "Giant Steps" in 7/4, transposing tunes into funny keys, like A, stuff like that. The poems are great, Hulk is proud.

Piggie is 10, which is ancient, and she is extraordinarily tall. She loves school, and at the moment, it is loving her right back. Today she is asking questions about cells and molecules and what everything is made out of and where it all came from.

Hulk is down to just one class and a stack of books for his tutorial exam, which will occur some time in the spring. At least he thinks he is. Baby is always quick to remind him about a pesky incomplete that looms... but in any event, the tutorial exam seems (according to Hulk's wise and distinguished academic advisors) like a better route to simply demonstrating what he has learned, without pretense. The thing about that is, then he'll need to start thinking about what one does with an MA in English lit. One might make a paper airplane, I suppose, or work in a bookstore, perfecting the art of looking as though one had something better to do. Or one might be just lucky enough to eke out another season of racing bikes full time before the cold realities of grown up life come smashing-crashing down on one's poor, wittle head.

And on the subject of bikes, Hulk is in the midst of what looks to be his finest cyclocross season yet. Same team plus a new sponsor and the addition of a new teammate who is one of the top 10 'cross racers int he country are all making for a good Fall. Finally Hulk has realized that lots of rest and showing up to races feeling fresh and ready to go really hard is a better recipe for fitness than dragging himself through really hard intervals workouts on Wednesday, from which he rarely recovers in time for Saturday's race. Bike racing form is a funny thing, and the recipe is highly individualized and hard to perfect.

Oh, also, on 9/12/08 Hulk got old. 31 times old. He feels old. Old. Like gray-hairs-in-the-beard, I-listen-to-Jackson-Browne-because-I-want-to, my-kid-is-in-the-5th-grade kind of old.


Perhaps most importantly, there was the aforementioned canoe trip. Which looked like this:

On this abbreviated weekend in late August, up in the St. Regis wilderness of the Adirondacks, Hulk and Baby rediscovered what being in love, and being friends, and breathing air, and living slowly are all about. Really, they discovered a portal into a parallel, clock-free universe of clear-water ponds, blueberry bushes, firelight, and incomprehensibly sound tent-sleep. Plus Hulk splooshed spectacularly overboard and landed up to his neck in quick-mud, much to Baby's delight, and they learned what portaging a canoe for 3k feels like, and they saw a bald eagle, many loons, and just enough bear poop to make them cautious.

Now it is October, Hulk heads to beautiful Gloucester harbor once again for his annual pilgrimage, and another weekend of rediscovering himself through hypoxia and high speed. Baby is locked in her tower, with occasional forays out into the world for suguar and exercise. The job market doesn't know what hit it, and the other creative writing scholar kiddies on the block haven't got a chance.

Until next time, and the flying snow,

-n&c-