heading north

Time to leave the big city and return home. Yippitayayey, git along little doggies, you know that Wisconsin will be your old home.

Where are you from?
I don’t know how to answer that. I live in Wisconsin for now.

No, wait, that’s no longer true. In 2006 I am introducing a new line:
I live in Wisconsin. I will keep on living in Wisconsin. Nothing leads me to believe I will live anywhere else. Except for long summers away, riding a motor bike in rural France.

When the weather turned nice in Evanston on Sunday, my thought was: I need to get to some place where the quality of the weather matters. It doesn’t in Evanston. Except when it is cold and you have to move the car every two hours until 6 pm because the parking police are out to get me. They already got me once, the little creeps, not again. Never again.

And on a tour of four night stands, my suitcase and computer in hand...
I could live four nights out of the week elsewhere. I could work on my classes, do my reports, emails, calls from some hole up north and come down only to teach. I need WiFi and a good grocery store, that’s all. Probably hard to come by up north. Forget it.

I have a song, I think it’s a song, it's about you…
I have this discussion with my friend Ed all the time. I ask:
Do you need other people?
No, not unless I can engage them and they me. Not for the sake of just being with people.
But, but, how is it that you could talk to someone and not try to engage them?
It either happens or it does not. It's okay if it does not.
And when you are engaged? Then what? Do you come to need that person (those people) to make you happy?

I got him there, because the answer is, of course, yes.

I wont move up north, south, east or west because I am engaged in multiple ways right here.

[Except when I have to pack up and leave. But only for a while, always just for a little while.]



first Cosmo of 06: to Ocean readers