This Land...

People ask me often enough what I've been up to.  Like tonight, Elaine said she hadn't seen me in a while, and she asked me what I'd been up to.  I said, Nothing that I'm not normally up to in the summer, which was true enough.  Kimchi workshop was good, I said, which was also true enough.  These are the sorts of sheepish answers I give when people ask me that question, which is to say that they are untrue—but it's simply not socially adept to launch into a long-winded talk about riding your bicycle around with a video camera with someone who is an acquaintance at best when one of you is merely throwing away a napkin and the other is breaking up a chocolate bar and preparing snacks before a poetry reading in the tight little back room of a poetry business.  So I just lied and said the same old same old.  Summer is going good, I said.  How's yours, I said.  If I had been less of an idiot, or less shy, or simply more interested in talking, or if I'd been drawn out of my shell by some forceful magnetic shoes, I probably would have started gabbing away about the film I made while riding my bike up and down a couple farm roads in Hadley; I would have talked about those roads and about the road I will take back to New Mexico this fall to work, once again, on Stan and Rose Mary Crawford's garlic farm.  You can see what a mess it would have been to spill all of that on an unsuspecting friend who was washing strawberries.  It's better just put it here so that you can see what I've been up to—whoever you are—and hopefully, if you hang around long enough, you can join me as I drive out to New Mexico this mid-September.  I'm going to make a movie about it.  But no more gabbing.  You can get back to scrubbing your foot.  Here's the short film.