A month of haiku: Week 1

La dama presiding over a float in the New Orleans St. Patrick's Day Parade, March 2011.

Spurred by the boundless creativity of my friend Elle Crash, I’ll be writing one haiku a day during April, which is National Poetry Month. Since I love a theme, my haiku will be inspired by places I have lived or visited. Here’s Week 1:

April 1 – Milwaukee
Two rounds with this town
Law of diminished returns
Grabbed me by the throat

April 2 – Portland, Ore.
Dream of the ’90s
Broke in my Docs on Burnside
Learned to drink coffee

April 3 – New Orleans
These streets feel ancient
Sighs and screams crushed in layers
Beneath dancing feet

April 4 – Dayton, Ohio
Chasing your genius
Dragon roars louder than life
We’ll always need more

April 5 – Wausau, Wis.
Lived in the newsroom
Always loved this town best in
The rearview mirror

April 6 – Marshfield, Wis.
Literal cowtown
Gravel roads led straight to Mars
Shed so much blood here

April 7 – Detroit
Summer of no sleep
And no bed, just my four wheels
Up and down Woodward

Not dead yet

Ticket to ride.

What I’ve been doing for the past five months or so, while I’ve been neglecting this blog:

∆ Posting random thoughts, images and autobiographical jukebox selections on my Tumblr blog, Strange Loop.

∆ Discovering more reasons to love New Orleans during my third visit to the city in less than a year (and yes, I’m already making plans to go back).

I love rambling through the French Quarter early in the morning, when the streets are still quiet and have not yet been scrubbed clean of the previous night's debauchery.

∆ Becoming better acquainted with Florida during road trips to Panama City, Jacksonville and Gainesville.

∆ Putting in some volunteer hours at Full Earth Farm, a small farm in Quincy, Fla. This lifelong city girl had no idea that feeding compost heaps, yanking out weeds and playing a (very small) part in building a new greenhouse could be so much fun.

Behold the power of Full Earth Farm's fully armed and operational greenhouse.

∆ Thinking, researching and writing about local food and the people who grow, sell, cook and consume it. (More information about that project coming soon).

∆ Reading stacks of zines and other independently published works. Jacksonville and Gainesville each have awesome zine libraries, and I’ve visited both of them in the last few months.

The Civic Media Center in Gainesville has a swoonworthy zine collection.

∆ Listening to Jennifer Egan read the first chapter of her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, “A Visit From the Goon Squad” — is there anything more thrilling than hearing a writer you love read her own words? — and talk about her writing process.

∆ Watching “The Interrupters” and marveling at the consistent genius of Alex Kotlowitz, who produced the movie with filmmaker Steve James. This heartrending documentary about the brave souls who work to stop street violence in Chicago is the most thought-provoking film I’ve seen in a long, long time.

∆ Spinning a lot of Leonard Cohen — his own recently released album, “Old Ideas,” and Greg Dulli’s pitch-perfect cover of “Paper Thin Hotel.” Also on heavy rotation around here: New records by Guided by Voices, Robert Pollard, Lucero, Ryan Adams, the Heartless Bastards, the Cloud Nothings, Ani DiFranco and Bruce Springsteen.

∆ Filling our little townhouse with a diverse group of wonderful Tallahasseeans to celebrate the Professor’s birthday. Wow, we’ve met a lot of great people in the 18 months that we’ve lived in Florida.

One of the Professor's awesome birthday gifts from our Floridian friends.

∆ Driving from Tallahassee to Chicago for the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Conference and the Chicago Zine Fest, with an all-too-brief stop in Cincinnati and a quick dash to Milwaukee. (You can find a handful of photos from the trip on Strange Loop under the tag “Leap Year Road Trip”). During the 17-day, 2,100-mile journey, I racked up more great outings, memorable meals and inspiring conversations with my Midwestern friends than I can tally.

Chicago's unofficial flag.

Places that are gone: Estrella

The Year of No Sleep: A (Thus-Far Unfinished) Mix Tape

At Estrella, you never could guess whether your order of empanadas would arrive in 15 minutes or 55 minutes. You couldn’t predict whether the poblano-and-cheese filling in those little half-moons of dough would be sublimely seasoned or more arid than a lump of Play-Doh.

And the sort of garb your server would flounce over in during any given meal simply flouted all prognosticatory attempts. At dinner one night, your waitress’ order pad- and pen-laden hands would emerge from within a peasant blouse so voluminous it could fit two. The next lunch shift, she’d drop off your drinks in a white T-shirt tight enough and transparent enough to show off a matched set of nipple rings.

The only thing you could count on, really, was the omnipresence of music. One well-meaning restaurant reviewer tried to capture Estrella’s sonic ambiance by writing, “The music of the modern counterculture pounded through the room as the boots of Doc Martens-clad patrons shook the floor.” But that wasn’t the whole story. The stereo tucked beneath the bar in the dining room and the kitchen’s grease-encrusted boombox pumped out sounds so eclectic that categorization often eluded even the music-obsessed regulars.

Usually the weightless notes of Afro-Peruvian jazz perfuming the dining room clashed with the vintage power pop bouncing off the kitchen’s close walls. Once in a while, though, the separate soundtracks to each room’s activity – the pace most often frantic, occasionally languid, never any speed in between – melded into each other in a way that seemed to denote meaning. Or at least served as a late-’90s precursor to the current mashup revolution.

Side 1: The Kitchen

Within the cramped and cluttered kitchen blazed the soul of Estrella, bursting forth like the flaming corazon of a Mexican painted-tin ornament. Temperatures and temperaments ran to the dangerously hot and humid, especially during dinner rush. The emanations from the boombox distracted the sweat-drenched cooks from alternate uses of the knives with which they quartered quesadillas and filleted red snapper. More importantly, the music masked the frequent squalls of stovetop shouting from the patrons in the dining room.

Side 2: The Dining Room

Stepping through the doorway from the kitchen to the front of the house felt like skipping from mid-August straight to late October. The dining room was a sweat-free zone that the staff fought to maintain, no matter how many margaritas a wobbly-armed server sent splashing across the bumpy wooden floor. Brazilian el foro, Portuguese pop songs – during the Saturday-evening blitzkriegs of hungry diners from the suburbs, the songs on the stereo slipped around the tables without dropping a single English word on which to loop a distracting thought. The weeknights, owned by the not-quite-starving artists populating the surrounding neighborhood, belonged to drastically slashed drink prices and rock albums with serious indie cred.