(This Screech courtesy of Morgan Packard, whose music graces this little movie.)

Airships Fill the Sky / Unsimulatable is done, mastered, manufactured. It's my first solo album (the Airships part), plus a DVD documenting the very rich collaboration which has grown between myself and visualist Joshue Ott (the Unsimulatable part). The packaging is gorgeous, and I'm quite proud of the contents. A few review quotes completely removed from context:

"it's this sort of experimentation that keeps it leagues ahead of the pack"
~smallfish records

"lugubrious grace"
~resident advisor

"(dare I say it) a near perfect debut"
~WHITE_LINE

"Glitchy synths and beats Makes the dang accordion Somewhat bearable"
~Edmonton Vue Weekly

For a preview of the album and DVD, go to
http://www.anticipaterecordings.com/releases/ANT_002/index.php
For digital downloads, go to your favorite mp3 store:
beatport.com itunes emusic.com

On a warm October afternoon a couple of weeks ago Anna and her boyfriend Adam went for a walk down the road and over the covered bridge. They were here for the weekend, catching up with old friends who had also come back to the home town for a few days. I met them at the door as they returned from their walk, on my way out to the back yard. Their faces were radiant. "We have something to tell you," they said. And it was then I noticed the leaf on Anna's ring finger. Adam had proposed to her on the covered bridge, the river crossing over which her mother and I carried her as a baby, wheeled her on dozens of stroller rides, pushed her as she wobbled, learning to ride her bike, and over which, as she grew up, she walked and ran and rode and drove countless times. So now the crossing she makes is into marriage, and why that seems so different from the long and good relationship she and Adam have had is something I don't really understand, but there it is. That they chose a leaf as an engagement ring to seal the deal brought me to tears. If these two can promise each other love for life with something as ephemeral as a leaf, then there is not only new hope loosed in the world, but new faith born again on a covered bridge in New Hampshire for what love is and where it can take us. Of course, wearing a leaf as an engagement ring has its limitations, and so last week our daughter and son-in-law-to-be bought an antique ring as a replacement. For the rest of my life, howver, I know I shall always see the leaf on her finger and remember the tears of happiness in her eyes.

On the longest night of the year, and as yet one of the coldest, our kitty roused herself from her deathbed on the couch and wandered down the hall, jumped up on the bed and snuggled in under the covers with Joan. For the past three months she has not been well, eating little, vomiting lots, and weakening daily. For the past week or so she has not eaten any food nor drunk any water. She is growing thin and listless and spends most of her time curled up on the couch. Our vet, a country doctor not much given to expensive fixes for sick pets, thinks her liver is failing, but we really don't know. He sent her home with us, and we all expected she would die within days. She hasn't. We could spend large sums of money to find out exactly what is wrong, but both Joan and I, without discussing it, have decided enough is enough. And I'm not talking about the money. At least I thought that both of us had decided. But Joan never completely closes a door, and will often open those which the rest of us assumed were locked and shut forever. It is a lesson that I never can seem to learn from her, and it's just one of the myriad reasons I love her. This morning I got the kitty to take a few sips of water. I felt good about that. A bit of water for our dying cat. But when she got home this evening, the drink the cat took was for Joan a door to open.

When we found her seven years ago she was a tiny wild kitten trying to catch mice on the stone wall across from our house. Joan spent a day enticing her into a box, and finally succeeded. She spat and hissed like a wet firecracker. We tried to give her away, but would not take her to the animal shelter where we knew she'd be killed. In a distant life when I used to work for such a place in Indiana I had killed thousands of kittens and cats like her. We would make out the list in the morning and walk along the cages with a syringe of sodium pentobarbitol. I would slip the needle between the ribs of a perfectly healthy cat and inject 5 ccs into her heart. Death came instantly for most cats, and I don't want to talk about the others. But that was almost 30 years ago. Seven years ago, none of our friends would take our wild little kitty, so Joan took her to the vet for a rabies shot, and brought her back home in the cat carrier. I was sitting outside on the lawn. She placed the cat carrier near me, and I spoke to the cat, idly touching the bars of the door with my finger. What are we going to do with you, little wild thing, I said. We can't keep you, you know. The kitten reached though the bars with her paw to touch my finger. I can still remember the soft, feather-light warmth of that touch. We decided to keep her. At first we called her Mouse, and then some other name which I don't recall, but which had some unpleasant sexist echo to it, and finally we began to call her Little Kitty. And we still do, even when she grew to a size that was anything but little.

As I write these words Joan is searching the internet. She comes downstairs. Read the sites I emailed you, she says. I do, and a bad feeling grips my heart. From her symptoms, it seems likely that Little Kitty has a liver disease that is not uncommon for fat, middle aged cats. A disease which is really not necessarily liver failure. A disease which can be treated with a surgically implanted feeding tube and 6-7 weeks of five times daily feeding of a special high protein liquid diet. And of course it's more complicated than that, and should include liver biopsies and lots of blood analysis and the diagnostic attention of veterinary specialists and other major medical interventions. But 80 percent of cats can survive this problem. If this is what she has. Hepatic lipidosis?

Now I'm in the kitchen searching the junk drawer for a syringe. I find one, and flash back as always to those rows of cat cages in that animal shelter long ago in Indiana. But instead of sodium pentobarbitol, I fill this one with a few ccs of water blended with a teaspoon of very expensive all beef catfood. Now I'm back sitting on the couch, petting Little Kitty and explaining that there is little to do for the problem of human foolishness. Samuel Beckett's words cross my mind: No matter. Fail again. Fail better. I squeeze the juice down her throat. She gags a bit, but takes it. I pet her slowly for more than ten minutes. I wonder about things. I worry how much we miss.

It is my wish that your crops are in and were bountiful, that your wood is dry and ready, and that your animals are healthy and fat and prepared for the long winter.
In Warner, NH, the Courser Farm, an old farm going back many generations, maintains an annual tradition of placing hundreds of jack-o-lanterns in the fields, carved by local folks. Last Sunday, when the government stole an hour of our daylight, we went walking among the jack-o-lanterns. It is one of the best ways I know to prepare for the months of darkness ahead.

The Pratt Institute in Brooklyn heats itself with the oldest operating steam plant in the country, and on New Years Eve the engineers run a steam line out of the building onto the green in the middle of campus. Over the years they have put together a collection of whistles that looks like what would result from the collision of half a dozen huge pipe organs and a couple of steam locomotives. The crowds gather an hour or so before the new year turns, drawn by the whooping, ululating, screeching, roaring and howling of the whistles. The engineers hand control cords to anybody in the crowd who needs to blow off a little, or a lot, of steam, and when it all goes up together, the very ground beneath your feet shakes. As it should to celebrate the tossing of 2004 onto the dustbin of history, and the promise, as the new year always promises, of 2005.

About a year ago a guy I know asked me to produce a play, because he'd just fired the original producer who seemed to have got himself in a pickle over the inappropriate use of some federal grant money. Producing a play wasn't anything I'd ever done before, and if I'd been him, I wouldn't have hired me. But I wasn't, and he did, and somehow I managed to pull together enough people who actually knew what they were doing and had the talent to put on a show. Everybody said that, in fact, it was a pretty good show, and because I don't know anything about theatre, I'd have to take their word for it. But two hours after the last applause had died and the cast and crew had taken the set down I stood the town hall with Hank, my friend of many years, wondering how something that had taken so much work could disappear so quickly, and thinking about the playwright Samuel Beckett's admonishment to "Fail again; fail again better."

Take a head of lavender and hold it between your palms and let the heat from your body warm it until you imagine you can feel the scent leaching into your skin and then into your blood. And imagine your blood carrying that blue scent through the rivers of your bloodstream and releasing it just beneath your skin, just under the skin of your whole body, the scent and its blue glow until you feel the blueness itself as what your are. Then crush that warm head of lavender between your fingers and offer the perfume that streams off your fingertips to the one you love. You'll remember this forever, the smell, the fields, the young girls sitting in the rows chatting and laughing and clipping the flower heads into their baskets.

In Georgeville, Quebec, on the shores of Lac Mephemagog last week, we spent a day and a night in the Auberge Maison McGowan, an 1870s boarding house that somewhere along the line was converted into a quirky little bed-and-breakfast. My 55th birthday was just a week away, and I was getting edgy. Everything has been making too much sense. I couldn't remember the last time I had been truly mystified, to say nothing of glamoured, to use the archaic sense of the word. I was, and am, less confused than I know I ought to be, and that in itself is confusing. I'm supposed to be panicked about how little time there is left, and disconsolate about the discarded dreams along my path. How do you say, "Well, that's life," in French? How do you sell your soul when there's no devil at the crossroads?