Day: December 22, 2011

Welcome to the new Bedlamfarm.com Thanks so much to Toby, Chris and Brendan at Mannix Marketing. Testing, and more to come.

I’m having a good time with the Christmas Plot. I have Maria’s gift hidden. She is blogging and then taking a few days off. She is very disciplined about technology, and she has no trouble staying off machines.She will be taking a walk with me and reading in short order. We are going into Glens Falls today to get some Xmas gifts and some gifts for the dogs. I hadn’t thought of it but she did. She doesn’t go on Facebook to chat much, so although she is aware I have some discussions going there, she doesn’t really want to know what the present is until Christmas. It’s called maturity. I don’t have too much of it.

Also she wondered if I wasn’t trying to steer her in the wrong direction by suggesting it had something to with her computer. “You could  just be trying to trick me,” she said. Maria is not like me in the sense that she is happy to get the present on Christmas, and won’t spent much time wondering what it is. She will yell at me when she gets it, as she always yells at me when I get her something. You don’t need to get me anything, she says, but this is not so. I do.

Once she’s unplugged, I’ll write about it because the choice of gift was interesting to me.

I posted my first blog entry Memorial Day, 2007. I was planning on seeing Pirates Of The Caribbean with my then-wife and my then-friends. I was living in a fantasy world that was soon to implode, and my life was about to change. My blog helped saved my life, and helped reinvent it. I see my blog as a living memoir, the record of a writer’s life, and I think it will long outlast me. Hope so. This is the last post on this version of bedlamfarm.com. The talented people at Mannix Marketing say they will need an hour or so to get the new version of the blog up and running. I love it, it is a wonderful and creative expression of my life now.

The main page will be the Farm Journal, and some enlarged photos. You will be able to access the Facebook conversation and the videos on YouTube right from the Journal Page. I’ve added a page called “Blogs I Love” that I hope helped connect creative blogs that support the life of the individual to one another.  The heart of the new blog is the Farm Journal and the photos. There a place for my photos, and a separate channel for my book tours, events and news about my books and writing life. The site is elegant, clean and powerful, thanks to Chris Archibee, Toby Dawes and Brendan LaRock. Thanks much. A tip of the keyboard to the ghost of Steve Jobs who reminded me to keep it simple and focused. I think we did that. You will see the new site shortly, and my next post will be on it, a powerful way to bring in the New Year.

The blog, as always, is a reflection of my life, and also of the powerful and enduring community that has grown around it. I thank you and welcome you and will work hard to be open and honest and creative and thoughtful. And to do my job and bring light and color to you.

Blogs are still not taken very seriously by the straight and other media, but they are becoming very important in our culture. Thomas Jefferson would have loved them. In a way, they were his idea. Thanks to you, too, Tom. See you soon on the new bedlamfarm.com

Well my Christmas plot to keep Maria from finding out much about her Christmas present – I’ve been plotting this for months – largely collapsed yesterday, to the gentle ridicule of many people on Facebook. “Well, duh –” was one comment. I had told Maria I wouldn’t be blogging until after Christmas, figuring she wouldn’t check the blog out. But she did, of course, as everyone but me realized she would.

The good news is that she still doesn’t know what I got her, and the other good news is that she doesn’t really want to know. “I like being surprised on Christmas,” she said joining in the general jeering. “I don’t want to know.” All right, I was wrong.  Okay, okay, so I am not as clever as I thought, and she is. She knows I was fiddling with her computer, asking her for her passwords, and she nearly caught me trying to set the thing up. Bloody, but unbowed.

I will sneak it into my luggage and give it to her in Brooklyn Christmas morning. She will, I think, be surprised, still. Next year I will start earlier and think harder. Maria does not buy herself things – she nearly checked herself int the hospital when she bought a sewing machine earlier this year. I love to buy people presents, one of the Big Shot residues I hope to be able to keep. And I love to buy her presents especially.

Maria is herself the most wonderful present I could possibly have been given. She is the gift of love. She radiates love – for me, the earth, the animals and birds, for life. This is something I have wanted all of my life, and the strange thing about life is that if you wanted to find a place where you were never likely to find this kind of love, you’d go to a small hamlet in upstate New York on a 90-acre farm where there are hardly any people. Go figure. We had been looking for one another for years and so I never forget what the real gift of Christmas in, and I think that love is really what this holiday is about, along with gifts surely.

Every day I remind myself that there is love and beauty and light in the world, no matter what cruelties and anger their news sells us every day. We do not have to buy it. A woman e-mailed me that she was cutting the news down to 30 minutes a day. My wish for her is that she cut it by another 30. Love and light and connection and creativity are big stories, and here, as recent weeks have shown. I hope they are all wrapped up for you under the tree.