Hi. I’m Eric.
Apparently I blinked and a few years went by.
That happens, I guess. You start a blog, make a few posts, survive a pandemic, make some music, settle deeper into a place you once thought of as “where my wife is from,” and suddenly you realize the blog is sitting there like an old guitar in the corner. Still in tune? Maybe. Covered in dust? Absolutely.
But here we are.
When I started Wicked Dude of New England, the idea was pretty simple. I was a San Francisco guy trying to make sense of Western Massachusetts. I had spent most of my life in the 415, surrounded by ocean fog, Chinese restaurants, burritos, weirdos, musicians, tech people, old houses packed too close together, and the constant background noise of a city that never seemed to fully shut up.
Then we moved to Northampton. More specifically, Florence.
And suddenly I had trees. A backyard. Squirrels and chipmunks with no sense of personal boundaries. Deer wandering around like they were on their way to a meeting. The occasional fox. The occasional bear. And a level of quiet that, at first, felt suspicious.
San Francisco had fog that rolled in from the ocean.
New England has fog that feels like it crawled out of a cemetery and knows your middle name.
So, yes, it took some adjustment.
The funny thing is, when I first moved here, I kept comparing everything to San Francisco. That was natural. Old instincts die hard. I knew the Sunset District. I knew Ocean Beach. I knew where to get Chinese food, where to get a burrito, where the weird little corners of the city were hiding.
Out here, I had to learn everything again.
Where to eat. Where to shop. Which roads go where. Why everyone tailgates like they’re late for a barn raising. Why roadside food stands close for the season just when you start craving them. Why people say “wicked” and somehow mean it without sounding like they’re doing a bit.
But over time something changed.
Western Massachusetts stopped being “the place I moved to” and started becoming the place where I actually live.
That sounds obvious, but it isn’t. There’s a difference between having an address and feeling like a place has started to claim you a little bit.
I’m still a San Franciscan. That doesn’t go away. I was born there, raised there, and I still have Pacific Ocean fog permanently installed somewhere in my operating system. But I’m also no longer just visiting New England. I’ve been here long enough now to have opinions, favorite places, complaints, routines, weather grudges, pizza preferences, and a backyard that keeps trying to become a wildlife documentary.
That means the blog gets to change too.
When I started this, I was mostly writing as a West Coast transplant looking around and saying, “OK, what the hell is this place?”
Now I’m writing as Eric Kauschen, the Wicked Dude of New England — musician, cook, observer, former San Francisco lifer, current Northampton resident, and occasional basement-studio goblin.
There will still be plenty of 415 versus 413 comparisons. I can’t help myself. There will still be food talk, because food is one of the easiest ways to figure out a place. There will still be music, because music is the thread that runs through pretty much everything I do. There will be New England weirdness, local observations, old stories, new discoveries, and probably a few moments where I stop and say, “I did not see that coming.”
Since I last posted regularly, I’ve made more music, thought more about what it means to keep creating as you get older, played around with new tools that didn’t exist when I started recording, and watched the world get stranger in ways that make New England seem almost reasonable by comparison.
Almost.
I’ve also come to appreciate something about this place that I didn’t fully understand when I first arrived.
San Francisco wears its weirdness on the outside.
New England hides it under leaves, stone walls, old brick, church bells, cellar doors, and people who tell you a house is haunted in the same voice they use to tell you where the good corn is.
That suits me.
So no, I’m not really picking up where I left off.
I’m starting from here.
The blog is still Wicked Dude of New England, but the underscore is clearer now: I’m Eric Kauschen, and this is the lens I’m looking through. A little San Francisco, a little Northampton, a little music, a little food, a little fog, and maybe just enough wickedness to keep things interesting.
Welcome back.
Or maybe I should say: welcome back to me.
Either way, let’s see where this goes.
— Eric Kauschen
The Wicked Dude of New England