Tag: Bloomington
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The backpack
My nephew is graduating high school and going to Indiana University to study computer science in the fall, which has set off all sorts of nostalgia triggers for me, as I think about when I made the same journey 247 years ago. My sister updates me on various registration and orientation events and visits and…
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Things change, pocket change
Day off today – I took a four-day weekend, no reason – so I headed to the mall in Pleasanton to buy a pair of pants. I have a wedding next month, and every pair of dress pants I own is comically large at this point. I got to the mall at about 10:37, and…
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Coke Zero, Hybrid Failure, SR2, Etc
They recently changed the formula of Coke Zero to make it “more like regular Coke.” It tastes like a mix of Listerine and cloves now. The only thing is has improved is my ability to quit soda, which hasn’t happened yet, but probably should. I would normally be more upset about this, but I ultimately…
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Distant summers
I realized the other day that the summer I fictionalized for my first book Summer Rain was twenty-five years ago. This should make me feel very old, except that it doesn’t seem like it was that long ago. I was twenty-one then, and in my mind, I’m the same person as I was then, but I…
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The Cloud, the Book, the Pissing Contest
I’ve been bitching and moaning about how Adobe decided to move all of their software to the cloud, and make people pay per month forever to use their stuff. I’ve also been bitching about how Apple decided to kill off Aperture, which happened about ten minutes after I imported and tagged 50,000 pictures, and would…
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The long walk to W384 Intensive Writing
I love it when it’s cool in the early morning after a hot day. There’s a certain charge in the air that’s unexplainable, not just the relief from the heat, but a somnolent, undisturbed feeling. It was 83 yesterday, and I woke up to 55, and it was wonderful, even if it will be back…
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Blast from the past: Morgenstern’s
Here is a receipt I found recently: Morgenstern’s was an interesting book store in Bloomington that came and went in the 90s, but was pretty central to my experience at IU. I don’t remember exactly when they opened, but it must have been around 1991 or so. There were no big box book stores then,…
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Another story from another kind of book
I’m still editing this book. It’s going to take a while, and I hate this part of the process more than anything, because it’s not the process of creating, of writing hundreds and thousands of words, and it’s not the process of holding a finished book in your hands, so it’s painstaking. And I have…
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A Hundred Years From That One Rush Album
I guess I haven’t written in here yet in 2012. Oops. I’ve been busy working on getting a new book released, another collection of short stories and flash, and that’s about done. But it’s been hard to get started on something new, and I really need to. Part of this is that I’m trying to…
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The gaps of summer
I find myself thinking about Summer Rain a lot lately, which is ultimately dangerous, I think. Next year will be 20 years since the Bloomington summer I fictionalized, and ten years since I actually last set foot in the college town. I think about the book because it’s a default way of writing for me,…