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2007-05-20 - 12:20 p.m.

Got a new roommate moving in. He's a welder. He has his own welding equipment. I don't know him well, but he seems like a nice guy. He's from Pittsburgh and has lots of tattoos on his arms. He said he won't be here much for all of July and August. When I asked him what he'd be doing, he said he was "doing a blacksmithing thing in northwest New Jersey, which is in the mountains, so it's not really New Jersey at all."

Went to Seidell's duckpin bowling on Friday night, on Belair (pronounced "Blair") Road. It was, Dickie says, the last rock and bowl ever. They're closing down. It was my first time there. What they do is close off the middle four or five lanes and set up a sound system. The first band was middle-aged guys who played, like, surf music. The second was this guy Caleb Stine, who I'd seen before and really liked, and The Brakemen. They do old rockabilly covers and Woodie Guthrie-type protest songs and some originals that seem to start slow but then rock out at the end. The third band was called The Grandsons and they had a sax player and that's about all that sticks in my head. Met some old-school Baltimore artist-types (guys who weathered the bombed-out eighties and early nineties without moving to the suburbs). One guy, John, did this semi-famous mural on 28th Street, of alligators in a row. Here's a photo of it, sort of:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sidereal/420525031/

He's a very nice guy, easy to talk to and gentle and smart. We drank this giant tupperware pitchers of Coors Light and bowled two and a half games. I broke a hundred twice, which is not so easy. Then we went to Rocket to Venus in Hampden and I have to say it was my first experience with what I'd consider a truly hipster bar. The place is huge and looks very cool. The ceiling, especially, has the same recessed square design as all the underground Metro stations in DC. We sat at a corner booth and drank gin and tonics.

Went to DY and Mary's party last night. It was cold: windy and intermittently rainy. We sat on the deck, eight or ten of us crowded in close around their glass table, the big umbrella covering our fronts but not our backs. We all got wet backs and told stories about ex-girlfriends and ex-boyfriends. People started off tame but, after Yuenglings, people started outdoing each other. By the end of the night, there were bedroom stories. I had no idea that so many people on this planet were into slapping and choking and bruises and stuff. I felt a little dirty and glad that I didn't have anything like that. When Elizabeth pointed to me and asked what my craziest ex-girlfriend story was, I just said that I'd summarize the girls and said, "All right, all right, crazy, crazy, and then her," pointing at my girlfriend across the table. So I got out of that one.

I should use my weekend days to grade stories, I suppose. But not quite yet. Hate to say that I'm looking forward to some, not so much to others. I guess all teachers feel that way. They wrote craft statements for their finals, which are fun to read. They explain why they wrote what they wrote, and how they came to make those decisions. I like seeing their reasoning. It's the best way for me to see if they can articulate, or at least spit back, the stuff I try to talk about all semester. Sometimes I learn something myself.

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