Since We Last Spoke......

Every generation or cultural milieu has their own set of cliches, and one of the more trite and predictable of the early 21st century must be the "blog-entry-serving-as-apology-for-not-blogging-in-quite-some-time". The wilds of the Internet are strewn with the decaying carcasses of calcified mommy blogs, rotting food blogs and hopelessly outdated political blogs. With online material boasting half-lives similar to something like carbon-14, our electronic diaries and paranoid musings will last far beyond the year or decade in which they were written, still capable of being accessed or Googled after the creator has passed on or the hotlinks have ceased functioning. As anybody who has ever trolled around the Internet can tell you, one needn't look hard to find any number of blogs featuring a months-old dateline along the top and some words echoing a basic variation on "well, I guess you're all wondering what happened to me".

I last made a blog entry near the end of January, and here we are in the first week of June. That's over four months of the blog being put on ice, which is a pretty long time to chill anything. However, I'm gladdened by the statistic offered up by the redoubtable Harper's Index, which notes that 94 percent of all existing blogs have not been updated in, you guessed it, four months. Which means I'm both in good company and not about to throw in the towel.

Fact is, I had plans to take a blog vacation for a few months as a series of events conspired to occupy the vast majority of my free time. In the most simplistic explanation, within the past few months, my wife and I moved into a new house, I continued working at a military medical library, and I completed my studies for a master's degree in library science via two large-scale graduation projects. During this time, I did very little reading, let alone writing. I'm happy to say that we are now comfortably situated in our new place in the University Heights/Hillcrest neighborhood, that my final grades have been turned in and processed, and that I am now ready to begin blogging again.

Yet, looking back over the late winter and spring, I find that any number of notable events have taken place that would have warranted a blog entry or two - events both personal and political, cultural controversies and memorable meals, sights seen and behavior observed. I may try and fill in some of these gaps as the summer progresses, but for now, a simple compendium of events should suffice.

In no particular order, etc. etc........

Since last putting pen to paper, I have :

---bid a fond farewell to J.D. Salinger, Alex Chilton, Herb Ellis, Malcolm McLaren, Guru, Lena Horne, Hank Jones, Art Linkletter, Dennis Hopper and Peter Orlovsky.

---spent literally nickles and dimes on various congealed clumps of matter designated "food" by the United States Navy, served in a cavernous and cheerless galley. After realizing I was actually looking forward to something called Taco Tuesday, I began relying more and more on pre-packed lunches for survival. Juice boxes returned to my life in a way they had not since first grade.

---purchased a bottle of 138 proof Grande Absente from a Long Beach BevMo' that has yet to be opened.

---sampled Koji kimchee quesadillas at Alibi in Culver City

---hit Koreatown with friends and tried my hand at Korean karaoke, which found me pulling off a game Mick Jagger imitation to "Brown Sugar" and a passable 50 Cent, the latter delivered from a supine position in a private karaoke booth.

---waved goodbye to the beach, to mold, to damp ocean air, and the ever-expanding pot fumes from the backyard trailer next door as we headed inland.

---dismounted a plasma television wall unit.

---tricked family members into coming out to San Diego to help us move to a new neighborhood on the cheap, paying them back mainly through food and visits to craft breweries.

---drove a 24 foot moving truck onto the major highways of the greater San Diego area - the 8, the 5, the 94 and the 15 - in both empty and fully loaded states for weighing purposes on truck scales out in the tumbleweed-strewn land of Mount Helix.

---transported multiple bags of year-old compost from Ocean Beach to University Heights in a desperate attempt to firm up our hippie credentials.

---started to walk to the weekly Hillcrest Farmer's Market and now carry our CSA farm box home by hand.

---stood, hands on hips, looking downward at a browning patch of lawn and wondering what course of action to take, thereby quietly becoming exactly what I hate.

---conducted a medical literature search on, among other things, California Sea Lion anaesthesia.

---personally shifted every single pre-1980 medical journal at the NMCSD Library from the main floor stacks to movable shelving units in the back, which I hope will soon be renamed "The Jason P. Gubbels Memorial Movable Shelving Units".

---become the proud owner of a hive of bees.

---subscribed to The New York Review of Books. Almost immediately began wondering how I'd survived without it for so long. Almost as immediately got into arguments with wife over whether or not I planned on keeping every issue I received and where they would be stored. Slowly realized that TNYROB was edging out time normally spent reading Lapham's Quarterly. Eventually concluded I was the most pretentious individual currently residing in the city of San Diego.

---rocked and rolled to the 7.2 - magnitude Easter earthquake that hit northern Baja and shook a wide swath of the West Coast.

---managed to keep alive the many fruit trees growing in our new backyard, including anna apples, weeping santa rosa plums, arctic fantasy nectarines, limoncellos, blood oranges, eversweet pomegranate, royal ranier cherries, kodota figs, brown turkey figs, green gage plums, satsumas, fuyu persimmons, loquats, pluots, peaches, strawberry guavas, and varieties of grape.

---dug up useless backyard grass in order to carve out garden plots, to be filled with chives, oregano, parsley, black beauty eggplant, burpless cucumbers, pickling cucumbers, sugar baby watermelons, habaneros, red chilis and poblanos, and five varieties of heirloom tomatoes (pineapple, Paul Robeson, green zebra, black brandywine and lemon boy).

---drank plenty of beer (both craft and crap), suitable amounts of liquor and not nearly enough wine.

---viewed the "Red Riding Trilogy" of British crime films, one per night for three nights, at the Ken Cinema.

---wasted countless hours, brain cells, reams of paper and electricity on my graduation fulfillment monstrosity known as the "E-Portfolio," a hulking beast of library theory and competency proofs. Towards the end of the project, I spent less time composing my submission than I did conjuring up ever-cruder variations on the name "E-Portfolio" (eg, E-Portsuckio).

---turned in a 41-page Twelve Month Programming Plan for a final library class, Programs and Services for Children. In the course of writing this paper, a once-proud English major both used the phrase "spooktacular" and cited "NintendoShopper.com" as a source.

---turned thirty-three, and threw a large party to celebrate, complete with a taco truck from Tijuana, serving up smoky and spicy carne asada and pollo asada street tacos.

---seen a musical project become legitimized through the tireless efforts of an old friend, as our 24-minute noise collaboration became an official release, courtesy of the Generator SoundArt label.

---scoured the better part of San Diego looking for squid ink, a key ingredient for squid risotto(hint: try Pacific Beach, of all places).

---painted a bedroom.

---stared aghast at a widening oil plume, sarcastically agreed with his wife that the government would soon be tapping James Cameron for advice, and was astonished to later discover this exact scenario took place.

---discovered A.J. Liebling and loved him, just like everybody said I would.

---spent the Memorial Day weekend in Chicago, in which I spent some time inside our Oak Park hotel drinking the bottles of New Glarus brew my father brought down from Wisconsin at my behest, but spent much more time admiring the local libraries and bookstores, the architecture and the lake front, and made two visits to Michigan Avenue's The Purple Pig restaurant, where we enjoyed Greek wine, whipped feta, and pig’s tails braised in balsamic.

---been told I am officially an information professional.

---finally started blogging again.