Harvey Pekar. Can I get an Amen?

Does anyone else out there in WordPress Blogland like, really really like Harvey Pekar???

A Plug for Columbus

Or, Jobs That Don’t Suck in Columbus. Seriously. I’m not in the market for an entry-level job these days, but I think there are plenty of keen jobs in this town as opposed to other jobs in other towns south of the Ohio River.  Not naming names here, but were I a young person doing the Appalachian Two-Step wherein one takes two or three steps out of one’s Appalachian town in search of a job, I would consider coming to Columbus.One of the swell, swell companies that has several stores in town is Half Price Books.  I worked for them for one day and they were great! (It was one day because a freelance job turned up on my first day of work to which I  really had to say “yes”– especially since Gabby was sick at the time).  I like Half Price Books  because they give benefits to their employees; insurance, profit sharing, 401K, discounts — plus they are very very nice! I had the best bosses for my 8 hour stint!!! I also like the Northstar Cafe because it’s great food AND because the employees are not expected to reach minimum wage with tips. Customers can tip if they want but really, it’s not necessary.  How often does that happen in the restaurant biz?There’s also a great art school here in town, The Columbus College of Art and Design which turns out artists like nobody’s business.  I want to take a class there some day when I’m not dealing with horses, working, trying to write fiction, knitting, or taking naps. I’m sure an enterprising young person who was interested in art could take classes there and also work at a job that doesn’t suck.

Saturday, Feb 16

The bareback lessons are what we’re doing for now.  The first thing that happens when I get on Mo is that I get scared. That unstable-in-the-vitals feeling washed across me, my hands and arms feel all loopy and shaky for just a moment, and of course I hang on for dear life with my lower leg which makes me slip and slide around.  So the first few minutes are all about me trying to find my center and not to fall off.  I wobble all over the place and Mo ignores me and wanders around as he pleases while I try to get the thing under control.  Today I  came off, but it was a very slow coming-off, more of a leaning forward and then a sliding to the ground rather than a falling off.  I was suprised to find myself standing up and was also quite proud.  It was a good way to come off!  I worked very hard in my 1/2 hour lesson and it wore me out but good. Towards the end, I couldn’t really put my leg anywhere useful, plus I had to stop and rest a couple of times during the 1/2 hour. 

Hung up about writing

I get so hung up about writing posts, you know, fellow bloggers out there?  I think that It’s got to be PERFECT somehow.  Oh, and then I have to figure out what perfection means or I get worried about some little thing about writing and blogging and then, viola as they don’t say in France, I write nothing.

I had another bareback lesson last week.  This is the tack that Leah and I are taking for the moment since I really have to work on my balance, plus it’s pretty darn cold still and sitting bareback on a nice warm horse is very comfortable.  Our weather sucks enourmously here, so I don’t know if there will be any riding tomorrow or not (Wednesday night is lesson night), so we’ll have to see.

I bought a new old camera recently, one of those point-and-click35mm cameras that used to cost $150-$200 and now are on e-bay and whatknot.  I was looking at old pictures that I’d taken with a similar camera many years ago and thinking how much more I liked them than the ones I’ve taken digitally. But I’m not much a photog. and I do think art is all — but there’s something about the heft of even a small point-and-shoot film camera that makes me feel comfortable. Waiting to get back the pictures.  I had only B&W film at the time and that takes longer to develop, so we’ll see if the shots of Mo and the cute puppy visiting at the barn on Saturday are any account.

Huh. Look at that.  Wrote a bunch of stuff and hardly even noticed.

Bareback Mo Lesson

It was cold last night, for sure, but it was straight-ahead cold, not the kind that comes with dampness and huge amounts of wind. Clear sky, stars, that sort of thing. I got to the barn a bit early and spent some time reading an article on cosmology and brains in space that Jack found for me but I get hung up over pretty much anything past 14,000 feet above sea level (I was on Pike’s Peak once and that’s enough) so I just don’t get it.  But the barn cats were fighting for space on my lap and that’s always nice.  Leah suggested that I do the entire lesson sans saddle to which I eagerly agreed.  I used to ride the late and lamented Sadie bareback, rode Gabby bareback once, and have gone a couple of turns on Mo. But trotting? Bareback? Ah . . .no. 

At first, I was nervous, trying to get Mo to move in a particular direction. He spooked at a couple of jumps and generally wandered around because I was too nervous at first to give him any direction.  Dear old Mo — he had my number right away and wasn’t going to do a damn thing that he didn’t have to. So after a few cries of “whoops!” and “Oh dear!”, Leah put me on the lunge line.  That was great.  It was wonderful and relaxing to know that someone else was in control and I when I relaxed, I was able to keep my seat and also able to tell Mo to move, darnit!Move! Plus it’s amazing how easy it is to feel what he’s doing! And warm? Mmm . . . .must be what the cats felt like when they sat on my lap. Never has there been more hair on my fuzzy winter riding pants than there was after last night’s lesson.

Driving into the sunset

My drive out to the barn this past Wednesday was wonderful because the sky was clear and I could really tell that the sun is setting later than it did one month ago.  Yes, I do understand that the sun isn’t really doing anything — the sun stays still and the earth lurches around in an ovoid pattern but we’re too tiny to really be able to understand that in a day-to-day sort of way.  So the sun comes up and the sun stays up later, all with the intent to make us happy. And in late January, driving west, it was doing a nice job of making me happy.  That’s what I love in the winter — those first sunsets that you notice 30 days past the winter solstice. 

Old Pictures

I started going through some old pictures this weekend. We tend to keep our pictures in boxes here at our house and some are labeled and some are not, so while dragging out the pictures is fun at the time, figuring out what the heck to do with them can be a chore later. I found an old photo of my dad as a child driving a goat cart, and that was pretty neat. I’m sure it’s completely posed and that he did not actually drive the goat cart, but it’s the kind of thing people used to do; plop their kids in goat carts, tell them to pick up the reins, and then whip out the Brownie and take a picture. Sort of like sitting the kid on a pony and sticking a cowboy hat on the kid’s head and taking a picture in the 40s and 50s. I like those pictures too.

Wish I had a picture of the first horse that I rode at the Crazy C Riding Stable in Mason, Michigan. Wouldn’t that be neat? I bet other people (I extend the invitation to our brothers despite the name of the blog) have pictures of when they were kids (even if being kid was, like, three years ago), seated on their first horse. The memories are good. Post ‘em if you got ‘em.

I thought some of my pictures were going to make me sad, like the pictures of my late father in his childhood, but they don’t. They make me feel human. So I’ve tucked a few them here and there, in amongst the book shelves, only visible from certain angles. A happy surprise to see loved vistas, pets, and people from the past: Oh look! There’s the beach! There’s the old back yard! And there’s that picture of a good face, right were I can see it any time I want. That’s the best one.

Doing the Same Thing at the Same Time is Often Enough (Movies)

Quite recently, a friend and I went to the movies together except that we went to different theatres. The movie was Sweeny Todd (no need to link; you can find it easily enough) and we got our wires crossed because more than one movie house in town has the same name in the title (The Classy Campus-View, the Classy Homestyle, The Classy Downtowner — no disrespect intended; it’s my favorite locally-owned movie chain and long may it run) and she went to one and I went to another. It’s kinda neat, really — we were both watching the same move at the same time but just in different theatres. It was a nice feeling of linking, especially when I found out afterwards that that she was at the Classy Downtowner while I was at the Classy Campus-View. And we still have lots more dish to do over the film. To that end, I checked out a video version of the Broadway original, and after I watch it we can compare musical theatre/folklore/theatre history observations with one another.

It’s also nice to know that I’ll soon be seeing the same movie, There Will be Blood (again, you can find it), that popped up in a discussion the other day. Indeed, it gives me a frisson of happiness to know that the style of Daniel Day-Lewis is a possible topic of conversation at some future time, and that the topic will be a movie. Movies. They’re just the best, aren’t they? We learn how to behave from them (the Godfather phenom has informed the behavior of the original family in Sicily according to an author friend of mine) and in return, the movies take their queues from us. They are a mirror, the way the horse mirrors his rider and the rider mirrors her horse.

Harvey Pekar’s book on the SDS

Nope, not a dang thing to do with horses and not much to do with barn culture as I have experienced it and I don’t hink horses have much to do with the SDS either unless there were some mounted police in Chicago in ‘68. But I’m a Pekar fan. So don’t steal this book because stealing it won’t help the writer and the artists, but do read it and buy it (or the other way round).

A brief and good lesson

Today we worked on how I hold my body when going to the right. I tend to collapse in and drop my right shoulder, and this became very obvious to Leah one day when I wore a sweater with a strong horizontal band across the upper back/yoke. Since then, I try to wear something similar so that Leah can more quickly spot what I’m doing. I do drop that right shoulder a lot (see post on “And all this time I thought it was the bra” or however I titled it) and of course I can’t tell that I’m doing it since I do it. So I’m trying to push Mo back outside to the wall with my inside leg, but *dropping* my inside shoulder at the same time which sends him a mixed message since dropping my (inside) shoulder is going to make him fall in to the inside. So today Leah had me place my left elbow at my hip (not cram it in there and hold it tight which is my instinct — Get a Bigger Hammer! Hang on Harder! Push More! — but just place it there). As soon as I did that, I quit dropping my right shoulder and voila! as they say, Mo could do what I wanted him to do. Neat, huh?