retirement!

Just posted grades in my last creative nonfiction workshop in my last semester of my last year of teaching at Cal State East Bay. In my first job at Fresno State, my office was in a “permanent temporary building” that was finally demolished, but when I left, they insisted I turn in my office key (to an office that no longer existed in a building that no longer existed) and I spent a day running from bureaucrat to bureaucrat getting affidavits about the missing key. At Cal State Hayward (as East Bay was called then), my office and classrooms were in the nine-story Warren Hall, which they blew up because it was seismically unsafe. (Here's a thirty-second video clip.) We gathered at the bottom of the hill in the K-Mart parking lot and a DJ blasted AC/DC’s “TNT” as the building toppled. Everyone cheered. Nevertheless I would say that the pandemic has made this my most surreal semester. Looking forward to a new editorial position that I can’t announce for a month or two, but I already miss my Cal State students.