Okay, so I did it.   Eventually, I’ll be blogging at twocouchesandabox.blogspot.com.  Once I get settled that is.  You know, in case you’re into that kind of thing.

I thought I’d let Jonas have the last blog, but, nope.  I’m doing it. 

A very short one:

Thank you.

Also, though:  My Advanced Poetry Workshop students are having a small reading tonight in the Showroom.  There may be refreshments, but probably not.  There will be young poets, though, and they will read.  It starts about 7.30.  Come on by, would love to have you.

Thank you again.

After my class yesterday, which was held outside on Wofford’s quad on a gorgeous spring (yet pollen-filled) afternoon, I stuck around on a bench and started to read through the multiple introductions in THE TIBETAN BOOK OF THE DEAD.  I kept expecting some senior-level professor to come up to me, tap my shoulder, and say, “I’m sorry young man, but we don’t allow adjuncts to be near students after class hours.”  But then, that suggests that anyone would take an active interest in some bearded guy reading a book on a bench on a pretty afternoon.  And that’s all ego, baby, that sick, twisted conceit that screams INDIVIDUATION over and over for most of my life.  According to some of these intros I read, that’s just not what I should focus on as a living being.  But I did (and do) anyway.  Because I’m a weak, weak man.

Seriously, though, this BOOK OF THE DEAD is a fascinating read. 

A long, long time ago, circa-early puberty, I remember an evening spent in a camp cabin with a group of people I absolutely revered as the smartest people in the whole world.  This had a lot to do with the fact that they talked about things besides boobs and the one or two wine coolers they snuck out of their parents’ fridges.  (Looking back, though, these guys were entirely full of shit, knew nothing except a few vocabulary words, and were, just as my friends were, quoting their parents’ nonsense.)  Anyway.  I remember one of the guys, Andrew, said that someone couldn’t be a Buddhist in contemporary America.  That stuck with me.  Lots of things stick with me, so, that in and of itself isn’t that interesting.  (For instance, the first phone number we had in Plainview back in ‘86:  8643434, the address:  HCR1 Box 42B, the inscription inside of the copy of RIDE THE WIND I received from Mrs. Graby (Mrs. Gravy) in kindergarten back in Silverton, “To my little reader…”) 

I’ve often thought about that idea, whether or not someone can be a Buddhist.  But then, really, can anyone be much of anything?  Something tells me that the whole notion of being is antithetical to reaching Dharma-Khaya.  It certainly runs smack against the Taoist’s wu-wei concept.  So maybe it’s not that Americans can’t be Buddhists, but that no one can, or that no one should try to be a Buddhist.  I don’t know.  I’m obviously spinning wheels this morning so that I can get this cart of mine rolling.  But, let’s take Phil Jackson, America’s most famous Buddhist.  Let’s take him and throw him into a dumpster, sell his billion dollar shoes, and scrape all of the enamel off his teeth, then let’s see how Buddhist he is.  One thing I’ll give to Yawheh is what he did to Job.  You don’t find that in Buddhism, I don’t think.  Or, I haven’t found it.  I like the idea of getting smacked down by an all powerful creator who made a bet with a fallen creature.  And then, yeah, there’s the whole Isaac and Abraham debacle, which Kierkegaard said lots and lots of smart things about. 

I don’t know.  I don’t really want to throw Phil Jackson in a dumpster (I do), but I do want to know more about this BOOK OF THE DEAD.  Yet again, though, I find myself searching for meaning and answers and interesting questions through a book.  Guess I should pack my hemp sandals and fly out to Tibet and study there, see it there, live it there, if I wanted to.  But, you know, if I gave up my ego, that would mean that I couldn’t write poems anymore, I think.  Or maybe not.  There’s some beautiful poetry written by Buddhists. 

Ah, what a morning.  For today, I intend to keep on reading, keep on cleaning, take a long walk, and listen to lots and lots of music.  You see, this is my last week at Hub-Bub, and I’m treating it like a vacation.  This also means that my blog’s almost a non-existing thing, as I don’t think I’ll keep one after I leave the Bub.  So, if you read this thing, shoot me a message or something, so that I know that you exist, and that you think I’m silly, and that you only read it to prove how much smarter you are than me.

Be well cool kids.

So I tore through Dean Koontz’s HIDEAWAY the other night and day and night.  To warn you, though, I’m about to ruin this book for anyone who hasn’t read it.  Probably.  I’m not actually interested in the plot all that much, not directly, at least.  But I imagine I’ll give away most of the significant plot points before I’m done.  Granted, this book came out in 1992, so, if you’re Koontz fan, it probably won’t matter.

Here’s what I’m thinking:  I’m a fan of literature.  I truly am.  Give me TRISTAN SHANDY or Robert Frost or James Salter any day of the week, and I’ll be happy.  I’ll give you a diddy, maybe.  I love tight sentences that fall across the page in ways that make you think of words like, bloom and engage and heartbreaking.  Sentence for sentence, I’m a fan of literature.  But, still, I have never, not to my knowledge, inhaled a piece of literature in the way that I inhale genre fiction.  Never.  If I pick up a Grisham or Crighton or King or Koontz (I can’t put Patterson down.  Won’t.), I finish it before I take my next meal.  I’ll skip things to finish book, lying to friends and family about obligations so that I can get some alone time. 

There’s always been this argument between genre and literary fiction.  And, by and large, I couldn’t care less.  I like to read what I like to read.  I get different things from a Shakespeare play than I do from an episode of Friday Night Lights–but not really.  Because, at their core, all written things get at the same damned issues:  love, God, sex, fear and death.  That’s all there is to it.  The difference is in how they get there.

Take Koontz’s HIDEAWAY.  The plot, minus the genre aspect, goes as such:  man and woman (married) have a car accident, man dies for an extended period of time, is revived, brought back into our life.  Before this accident, the couple had suffered the loss of a child.  After the accident, the couple resolves to live for every moment and, in doing so, they adopt a young, physically disabled girl from an orphanage.  The girl is witty and intelligent and guarded.  In the end, after some struggles, they become a family.

That’s the story.  Just like that, all said and done.  Now, the genre aspects of the book go something like this:  after being brought back from the dead, the male lead (Hatch) has a connection with another person who was brought back from the dead, a young man named Jeremy, who is pure evil and goes by the monochre Vassago (a demon of the higher realms).  As the story progresses, Vassago’s and Hatch’s connection becomes stronger, and Vassago comes after the new family bent on reproducing his original matricide and sister-cide that sent him to Hell in the first place.  So, yes, the theme for this book is:  homecoming, in all of its sordid ways.  I would say that over half of the book is devoted to Vassago and his plight.  Why?  Because evil is always more interesting to write about than good.  Read or re-read Paradise Lost and you’ll see what I’m talking about.  Satan is a fascinating character.  God, not so much.  (Perfection is boring, always has been, always will be.)  So, as HIDEAWAY develops, it develops these dual lines of plot so that, at the end, we have a great good vs evil showdown.  It’s all very entertaining and it keeps the pages turning.

However, if you were to remove the overt symbolism, the character dripping with evil, and wrote the story with just the husband, wife and adopted child, it would be, I would argue, literary fiction.  There’s no outside forces (at least, none with faces and sunglasses), and the story would be a wonderful short story, perhaps even a novella.  What does this mean?

I think that I’m intrigued with how slippery the divide is between genre and literary fiction.  I don’t feel guilty about inhaling genre fiction, because I get something else out of them.  I get to feel like a person, like a reader, someone who wants a story where the good guy smashes the bad guy’s face in with a crucifix, whilst floating through the air.  I like that.  But I also like reading literary fiction, something like Carver, where I’ll mull over a sentence, or a phrase, for months.  Literally.  Months.  There are sentences in Carver’s work that I’ve never gotten over.  And, right now, a couple days past reading Koontz, I couldn’t, even if prompted with a shotgun, tell you a single sentence, or paragraph.  But I could recount the story for you, blow by blow. 

That’s all.  I find it interesting. 

Anyone remember JAG?  It came on USA, I think, a number of years ago.  It was your basic cop/lawyer show:  pretty female lead, strong-jawed male lead, by-the-rules boss with a soft, personal side, ethics, all that.  The major difference, the pitch, I guess, was that it took place within the Navy.  But it kept the same formula as all dramas:  single event per episode that would reach resolution coupled with an extended backstory of the three leads, with ever enticing Sam-and-Diane tension between the male and female leads.  It kept us watching.  At least, it kept us watching until it got cancelled (there’s a whole post/paper on why we tire of this formula, I imagine).  Anyway, I remember playing golf with my father one time years back, when the show was still on, and I asked him why he wanted to watch that claptrap tomfoolery.  His answer was two-fold:  he liked (and still does like) to be entertained.  And, with JAG, at the end, he “felt like standing up saluting.”  I always like that defence because it’s the same tautology you run into with believers and those with faith:  they do it because they do it and that’s the way it’s done.  You can’t argue with that; you can’t convince them otherwise.  Trust me.  I’ve tried.  A lot.  But it came down to enjoyment, the reason why he watched every episode, the reason why he referred to the characters by their character’s first names, like they were real.  (And maybe they are, right?  Here we get into the argument of reality, but I’m not smart enough to do that.)

Why bring this up?  For years now, I’ve answered the question, “What’s your favorite movie?” with the straightfaced response of:  UNDER SIEGE.  Yeah.  I said it.  If I had a big enough paint brush, enough paint, and a large enough wall, I’d paint it up there, stand next to it, smiling all the while.  Most people, most friends, think I do it for the same reason that I wear my shirts inside-out (it’s funny, people, really).  In other words, they think it’s a point to make, a way to get away from being too serious about the inconsequential.  But that’s not true.  I honestly believe in UNDER SIEGE.  Here’s my reasons why, as best I can make them work right now, with the lamp on, with Mingus in the background, and absolutely nothing in front of me to snack on:

1.  We have to keep in mind that this was one of Segal’s later works (that’s Steven Segal, for you neophytes and sillikins that don’t know).  Before this, he was doing movies like HARD TO KILL and ABOVE THE LAW.  He had a ponytail in all those, too.  Now, I love me some ABOVE THE LAW.  I love it like a pile of twenties, but it was low budget crap, no doubt.  Most of his early works look like a fryguy at Burger King wrote down a plot on a greasy napkin and then went home and shot the thing in his basement.  UNDER SIEGE, though, had a budget.  It has legitimate actors, cool locations, and, apparently, they actually payed someone to write the thing with something better than the promise of lollipops and bananas.

2.  Let’s be fair:  the scene with the cake and Playboy chick coming out of it.  The sailor suit.  Come on, people.  Let’s get real.

3.  Gary Busey.

4.  Tommy Lee Jones as a harmonica-playing, ex-black ops agent, revolutionary who could freaking rock a leather vest and aviators.  Too, the first time I saw this show, I was just getting to fall in love with the blues.  I already loved violence, and I was a big big fan of nudity–so when Tommy Lee Jones and his band of misfits start ripping into a blues riff, and then start capping officers like gangstas, I mean, really.  Really.

5.  Now, the kung-fu set-up of a movie says that the final battle has to be the hardest for the hero.  But not in UNDER SIEGE.  In Segal’s flick about the Rastas, they upped the ante by making the heavy have an identical twin, so Segal had to kill both of those with roundhousing and armsnapping.  But, in UNDER SIEGE, it’s a wicked knife fight that Segal never gets behind in.

6.  Because it makes me want to salute.  I know, I know, I’m all against authority and war profiteering and battleships and uniforms and closed quarters, but, at the end of this flick, when Jones gets it in the eye, I want to stand up and sing something.  Maybe a Bruce Springsteen song, because he’s American as America gets. 

7.  In this one, Segal isn’t just a ninja, he’s a weapons expert and demolition guru.  I dig that.  My other favorite movie from around this time is SNEAKERS.  I like the idea of people teaming up and kicking ass. 

8.  Gary Busey.

9.  I know that Segal can’t act; I’m not a fool.  But I like that he didn’t care about it, ever, in his career.  He never tried to act.  He never really tried to do anything.  He’s no J.T. Walsh, he never really had to act, but he just did his own thing.  In UNDER SIEGE, his non-acting actually lends him credibility.  His character shouldn’t know how to be clever, or concise, or interesting.  His character knows how to make a bomb with an avocado and your face. 

10.  Because Segal didn’t check out the naked chick.  That’s hard, yo.  I mean, any movie nowadays, they’d stop, right?  Check out the chick.  You’d have this gratiutous (I just can’t spell that word) sex scene.  You know the one I’m talking about:  You never actually see anything of interest, just the downy part of the woman’s back and the one slightly attractive sliver of thigh that men have.  (Think about that most useless of scenes in the second MATRIX and you’ll know what I’m talking about.)  I mean, for such a low-budget flick, they should’ve had that sex scene.  But they didn’t.  They stayed true to the kung-fu, where the master has to avoid that kind of temptation so that he can continue to kick ass.

In short, at the end of the film, to this day, I’d stand up and salute.  I don’t get teary-eyed (which, to be honest, I cry a whole lot at movies, and books, and songs, and commercials, and lifts of the breeze), but I do get proud of him of doing something, of having a plan to kick Tommy Lee’s ass and doing it.  God bless him for that.

Hence, Segal, you rule.  (You too, Busey)

(oh god, thank you for this pic.  If I ever get a full body tattoo…)

Where to begin:  a few updates, I guess.  I’ve got a couple of new things coming out online in the next couple of months.  www.elimae.com picked up a short piece called “Antidotal,” which, if you made it to the Exit Show, then you heard me read that one.  Then, www.abjective.com picked up a piece yesterday called, “Carolina, Open Invitation,” which is a prosy-poemy thing.  The first one should go up in the next couple of weeks.  I’ll let you know.  The “Carolina” piece won’t see the net until July 4th, according to the editor.  By then, though, you’ll have yourself a new writer, a new blogger, a new resident of Apartment D, and you may not want to go flipping through the web to find my stuff.  That hurts, people.  That hurts right here.

No other publication news, I’m afraid.  In fact, little news with anything right now.  I’m not entirely sure where my next move will take me world-wise, but I imagine it’ll take me to a place where I should probably own more than one pair of pants.  I scoff at that.  I sneer at it.  As soon as I know my next move, I’ll let you all know, too.  Maybe.

As for the things that I know about, the things that I do over and over and over, here’s what’s happening:  I think I mentioned that I read INTO THE WILD, and then I went hiking.  When I talked to my father the other day, I had forgotten that I mentioned my desire to go all McCandless for a summer, pull the Keruoac and ditch the rug, too.  So, he said something about the truck, about how he understood that possessions may be getting in my way, and I thought, Holy shit, when did my old man start buying into my nonsense?  And then I smiled and smiled and smiled, because it’s a damn cool thing to have parentage that supports a quasi-bohemianism coupled with unemployment and dreams of owning a horse or two someday.  So, you know, thanks Pops.  Love you, man.

But I’m not giving up my truck, and I’m not going all Beat on everybody.  I don’t have that kind of energy, I don’t think.  Plus, I’m done reading that book, so I can now attach all of my crazies to something new.  I picked up a couple of books the other day in Johnson City:  Sartre’s THE AGE OF REASON and McMurtry’s LONESOME DOVE, which, combined, make a helluva combo.  Existential Western, I suppose.  And then, like the bookslut I am, I bought a copy of Cervantes’ DON QUIXOTE the other day.  Not a big deal, right, because everyone should own that book, but I bought it from Barnes & Noble, and I don’t usually like to support them.  But I did.  I so, so did.  That may become my summer reader for this year. 

As for movies:  I’m still saying that REDBELT is one of the better movies I’ve seen a long, long time.  But then yesterday, I re-watched HUSTLE AND FLOW, and I still love it tons.  Terrence Howard is D Jay.  What a beautiful movie.  And so is BLACK SNAKE MOAN, which was written and directed by the same guy.  But I liked H&F a touch more.  I also caught FLETCH for the umpteenth time.  Genius.  Genius.  Genius.

I had originally planned to come in here and write a whole bunch on why Segal’s UNDER SIEGE is my all-time favorite movie, but I no longer have the energy.  And I want to  get back into SANDOVER.  And I’m kinda hungry.  Later this week, though, I promise to explain the absolute amazingnesses and badassery of UNDER SIEGE.  Word.

Big fan of Charleston.  Huge. 

I’ve stepped inside of an ocean twice now.  Once, right around the turn of the century in Puerto Vallarta, and then again this past weekend in Charleston.  The first trip ended as badly as any trip can; this last trip included fried seafood, good scotch, an electrical storm, parasailers, bowling, and pool.  A good time.  On our first night, and this was way late, maybe three or four in the morning, I stood knee-deep in the Atlantic and yelled at the ocean twice.  The ocean was decidedly unimpressed. 

Thank you Greg and Lisa for a fantastic trip. 

Jonas and Ellie and I had a footrace in the middle of the night on the beach.  I’m not sure, but I think Ellie won. 

Like I said before, I’m not a picture taker, so I haven’t had the time to digest the weekend’s memories yet.  Or even make them into memories.  But, in a fantastic combination of my untidiness and pure serendipity, I found this line inked onto a napkin when I was cleaning up last night:  “There is love when you lose the power to speak, when you cannot even breathe.”  James Salter wrote that. 

On the second night at the ocean, I lost my breath. 

When we got home, I started doing laundry from the trip.  The jeans I wore on the beach the third night were still rolled up at the bottom, a la 1987.  That night we had the footrace, and the wind was blowing close to forty mph, so I started kicking the ocean up into a spray.  When I unrolled my pants back in my apartment and a glittering of sand fell out, I covered my face with the fabric and took a deep breath.  It meant a lot to me.

Of course, when serendipity starts, it’s all you see.  So it only makes sense that I’d be reading INTO THE WILD the same weekend that I’d let the Atlantic snuggle around my ankles.  No worries, though, because I don’t think I’d fare well thumbing it across the states, no matter how enticing that feels.  Or maybe I will do that, maybe just for a summer.  I don’t have McCandless’s sense of mission, though, his anger, or his intelligence.  I do have thumbs and a pack, which seems to be the more important, more realistic requirements.  Who knows, I may be tramping up to a place near you sometime soon.

That does it,  then.  Or almost does it.  The Exit Show, I mean.  Now, the only thing we have left to do as residents is to find a place to live for the next thirty some odd years.  Hopefully even longer than thirty; I just threw that number out there.  Before I get into that, though, let me say thank you to everyone who made it out to the show on Thursday night.  Thank you.  I thought that it went very well, and I’m not just saying that because I was there. 

My goal for the month is to get some more work done.  Applications, poems, stories, reviews, all that good stuff.  I hope to have an answer to the question, “What next?” by the end of April, but I can’t guarantee anything.  Guarantees are for telemarketers and vixens, anyway.  And I am decidedly neither.

In any case, I have started packing up to get ready for the summer.  I want to dwindle all of my possessions down to one backpack and one laptop.  Mostly, this is cool for me.  I only own one pair of pants, a couple of shirts, some socks.  And, by ‘own,’ I mean that most of my clothes were given to me by friends who know that I won’t actually buy new clothing, even if it’s used.  So, I have no attachments to clothing.  It’s the books.  I have to be careful, here, because I may have to Greyhound it around for a few months, so I can’t lug a box of books, even though I have considered that.  One box, is that too much?  Probably.  So, here’s my stack of books I’ve pulled aside.  These are the semifinalists, maybe, because I still have to chop them down to just a few. 

Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

THE DREAM SONGS by John Berryman(probably a definite)

THE GLASS HAMMER by Andrew Hudgins

HEROIDES by Ovid

COMUS, LYCIDAS AND OTHER POEMS by Milton

THE FRENCH LIEUTANANT’S WOMAN by John Fowles

“Hamlet” by Shakespeare

JOHN KEATS Ed. by Susan J. Wolfston

AGAINST WHICH by Ross Gay

ERRORS IN THE SCRIPT by Greg Williamson

OPENED GROUND, SELECTED POEMS of Seamus Heaney

FOUR QUARTETS by T.S. Eliot

COLLECTED PROSE, POEMS, AND PLAYS of Frost

COLLECTED PROSE, POEMS, AND PLAYS of Stevens

COLLECTED POEMS of James Merrill

FROM CONFUCIUS TO CUMMINGS Ed by Ezra Pound (probably a definite)

That’s it for this morning.  I haven’t even started to look through any of the philosophy books, though, which I’ll have to add onto here eventually.  So, yeah, I’ve got some choices to  make.  Maybe I just take two anthologies, the Pound and maybe Palgrave’s GOLDEN TREASURY, completely eschew contemporary poetry.  Ah. 

And, yes:  the guitar.  How do I not take her with me?  Where would she fit?  Do I really want to be that guy?  Maybe I do.

What else.  I’ve got a short coming out at www.elimae.com sometime next month, probably mid-month.  Same story I read the other night at the opening, in fact.  My friend Alan has some work up there right now, and it’s excellent, so go and read it. 

Seriously.  Go and read it.

from Auden’s introduction to John Hollander’s collection, A CRACKLING OF THORNS:

“English is a language to which the most natural measured rhythm is accentual iambic; it has many common monosyllables, the metrical value of which depends not upon their intrinsic quality but upon their position in the line; and it has, relatively, few rhymes, in particular few noncomic feminine rhymes.  The criteria, therefore, by which one judges a songwriter are firstly, his ability, by the use of equivalence and substitution of feet, to avoid rhythmical monotony without falling into rhythmical anarchy; secondly, his ability to vary the line length within a stanza in a way that sounds natural to what is said; and lastly, his skill in the finding of rhymes which sound neither forced nor cliche and in the placing of them so that the stanza is made an indivisible whole.”

I’m not sure if that ‘made’ is the right word for the fourth to the last word of the quote; I can’t read my handwriting there, but I think that’s close to correct.  Auden’s smart, eh?  I just like how he makes English sound a bit sub-par, as if he’d rather speak in narwhal-ese, the only pure tongue left on the planet.  More importantly, though, I love how he distills form down to its core in a matter of a couple of sentences.  One wonders if Auden revised his prose as much as he did his poetry.  Of course, one could go and grab his biography and learn that information, probably.

I also like how the three criteria for judging a songwriter begin:  his ability, his ability, and his skill.  Apparently, it’s all about his abilities and his skill.  Makes sense.  I mean, I like that Auden places the criteria on how to judge the poetry on the poet, not on the language itself.  It’s what the songwriter does to language that matters.  Seems different, maybe, nowadays, the way that language has become it’s own entity, wild with possible meaninglessness, feral.  We don’t try to control it, because that’s patriarchal, maybe, shows a hierarchy.  Let language be kinda free, seems to be one of the halfassed dictums of our times.  Granted, there’s plenty of poets out there who treat language with the attention that Auden’s talking about, but I think they aren’t in the majority.  Maybe that’s a good thing.  I don’t know, I’m just goofing off this morning.

On a side note, I’m enjoying Hollander’s work a whole bunch.  And we have our opening on Thursday, and it’ll be an exciting show, I’m sure.  It’s already exciting around here.  Come and hang out with us on Thursday evening, have some wine, talk about art, or tv, or whatever. 

It’s no easy thing to try and come up with words to cover 11 months of, as Jonas calls it (and I agree with him), heaven.  Maybe I shouldn’t try to do that, I think.  Although, walking in last night from my poker game (dropped, like, 2.20, but played quietly this time round), I saw that the marquee has this posted:  “AIR EXIT SHOW.”  Sure, it’s been up since Monday, but I was just then coming around to looking at it, to admitting that it existed, that phrase, “EXIT.”  When I pulled into town months and months back, I remember seeing the “WELCOME AIRs” as the marquee and thinking, ‘Holy shit, we’ve got a marquee and parking spaces.’  Something tells me that, given my career choices, this will probably be the only time I’ll ever have a parking spot blocked off just for me (and three other people, but, whatever).  And as we draw nearer to the end, I’ve got to admit that my brain doesn’t want to have anything to do with leaving.  Far as it’s concerned, this is June of 2008 and I’m about to crank out another 11 months of good stuff.

Sadly, that’s not the case. 

The other night I had one of those, ‘everything that I write is piss and drivel’ moments, threw me some pencils out of my window, cussed, etc.  I went through all of my files in Word and tried to convince myself that I’ve done nothing, here, that I’ve got no reason to write, should pawn my laptop and books, all that nonsense.  But, to my surprise, I’ve written a number of decent poems since I’ve been here.  I mean, I say that they’re decent, editors will probably say otherwise.  Editors aside, it turned out that I’m happier about my production than I thought, which came as a surprise.  A good one, yes.  So yesterday, before I taught, I went down into the basement stacks at Wofford’s library and worked on a new poem.  Sure enough drafted that thing, too.  It’s a sonnet for my new project, and, my god, I still like it this morning.  Everyone hold your breath, hold up two fingers, then cross them, because this may not last. 

But it’s not only the poetry and stories and the writing and reading that matters the most to me. 

I’ve never been much of a picture-taker, always thought if I needed to remember something significant, then I would.  I’ve also come to the conclusion that the things I really should remember, well, they don’t photograph.  Take yesterday.  (Please.)  I was sitting at my computer playing some chess online (shutup), and I heard Jonas playing his harmonica across the hallway, so I grabbed my guitar (Christine), and knocked on his door.  He was about to go to work doing some screen printing (the broadsides look fantastic.  The one for “My Dear,” and “Small Blues Song” blew me away.  And today, I think, he’s working on the broadside for, “After the Lightning Storm,” which I’m very curious to see how it’ll turn out), and I wanted to tweak the sonnet I drafted in the library.  But we played, you know, for a bit, one little blues jam, and then I came back over to my apartment and started revising.  That’s a good day.  That’s a memory that doesn’t quite fit into a viewfinder, that doesn’t care how many pixels and megapixels fit into a square of light. 

Oh, and there’s more of those things.  Like, how do you take picture of the day(s) I had a couple of extra bucks and spent the entire afternoon/evening trolling around the cinema, sneaking into movies and eating buckets of popcorn?  True, it’s kinda petty theft, the sneaking, but it makes it sweeter, too.  And I can’t think of any way to capture the fifteen minute period before a reading or opening than by using my own memory. 

So many things to talk about.  This is my blog of gratitude, though.  This is my thank you, even though the meal’s not quite done, the dessert’s still getting its froth of whipcream, and someone just cracked the Maker’s.  But, still, when it’s a damn fine meal, when everything was prepared just so and all the dinner guests have decent manners and a good sense of humor, then you find yourself saying, Thanks, again and again, commenting on how wonderful everything is, how much you love the drapes and dining set, the piano, the family dog.  You find yourself saying, Thank you for letting me into your home.

Thank you.