I moved into my new place in Indiana last last Thursday and tomorrow I begin the orientation for the Rhetoric and Composition program at Purdue. It has been an amazing summer, focused on the sensory and experiential rather than the intellectual, which might make for a difficult transition this coming week as I'm plunging back into the world of academia. Next week I start teaching and taking classes but I'm told even though this week is an orientation, it will be intense, a kind of boot camp for the coming teaching and course work. Who knows. In the mean time, here are a few facts about my move to Indiana: there was a dead mouse in my toaster, 179, 451 thousand people "like" the website dmv.org and Chris Rock doesn't relate to his kids. The cicadas are sustaining a high pitched drone that isn't that annoying and I keep finding their carcases on the sidewalk. The sky is over cast and it's about a fifteen minute bike ride to get to campus.

I have health insurance now, and a spacious apartment in Lafayette Indiana. People are nice here and it's been not too hot. Last night there was some kind of festival on main street but I stayed in to apply a few changes to the collection of songs / album that I've been working on this summer. Here is one of my favorites, it's rather long and I recommend you sit down and plug in. Pause pause. It's been a very non-literary summer in the sense that I've done hardly any writing. Having Dara next to me almost twenty-four hours a day for two months meant, amongst other things, that instead of sitting on thoughts until I had a chance to express them, I just talked all day non-stop. Why write anything down if you can just lean over to the person next to you and say it? There's an answer to that question. I don't know the answer to that question. But it might take me a little while to find my "voice" again for the blog.

The Wabash river runs through the middle of the town, dividing Lafayette from West Lafayette. The county is named Tippecanoe, which you might know from the expression, "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too" which, growing up, I heard about three hundred times from different people when they learned my name. Google search. The short version is it was a campaign song for the Whig part in the 1840 presidential election. Better yet is the actual song, as re-recorded by Oscar Brand for the Smithsonian and easily found on Wikipedia. And by better I mean pretty weird. This one goes out to the state of Indiana...