I’m lonely tonight, feeling isolated. I usually cherish my solitude as a chance for creativity or just productivity, though it’s been harder to feel that way since Tasha died. I mean there’s living alone and then there’s living alone, you know?

I remember when I first started getting into writing as an avocation in college. Being a poet was a tribal thing, though my tribe at the time was a small pack of soft, privileged white kids, who thought we had parted a veil and gazed on Being, wearing white light folded, supine on the dappled surface of Chico Creek. Bad poets, every one. A few had promise, but I don’t know what became of them. Now it’s hard to be a tribal writer, find your place and dig in. The internet isn’t much help, though you might hope it would be. So many voices, as Kerouac put it, “dealing with the pit and prune juice of poor beat life itself in the god awful streets of man.”

Which brings me to the topic at hand, bowling. That’s something I could be doing tonight instead of what I’m doing tonight. I could be someplace loud, with lots of people. The sound of the balls on the lanes, and the crash. Beer. My own bowling ball, so infinitely, intractably black that my hand would almost disappear every time I reached for it. Drying my hands in the little air vents, and finding just the right board on the floor from which to begin my attack. And you know that once I do, there is no hope.

I’m not sure I like bowling. I wasn’t bad in college, but that was a long time ago. I took the class at City College, to get past the PE requirement and transfer to Chico State. The last time I tried the game (don’t call it a sport) was early in 2005 and I sucked. But I was almost a twentieth of a ton heavier then, so God knows.

What I’m doing – besides writing this post – is trying to conjure a point of focus, a chord to strike, on which to build the last of a series of very short stores, story poems, which I started working on about a year and a half ago. A few months ago, I made a manuscript of them, enough to submit. But I need a knotted thread to tie them around – a title piece to set the tone. I’ve been mulling it over for a couple of months, and thought I had it when I was up in Northern California last month. I thought it was voices in the trees. So I wrote that, and then another piece, but that’s not it either. Now I think it’s images, photos, and how they bind us to the world.

Now I need to go out on the balcony for some fresh air, because I’m picturing a guy bowling alone, drying his hands with the little vent, taking a pull from his Bud Light, reaching into the darkness for his ball. See, being a writer of uncommonly pallid imagination, he forgot to write any friends into the scene.

See, there is grass at the bottom
of the stairs, and a tree. Just
a generic, nameless tree.
The street, black with a yellow
stripe, has a name which
doesn’t matter. That family is gone,
and their house, and we do not care.
But there is a field, thirsty
again though it rained last week,
when for days I thought of nothing
so much as of the dead. Then the sea,
which is blue steel, bitter cold
and hungry, in need of sleep.
Boats, oil rigs, islands, sea birds
lost and homeless, sick to death
of fish, and then the setting sky.
Ruby, saffron, tangerine, shouldering
cobalt and lapis lazuli. And beyond
the day’s grand finale of water
and terminal light is the great offstage.
Clouds line up to build tomorrow’s set,
where stars fidget, clear their throats
and sing the evening hymn. Beyond
that scene, a thousand dusty lines
of memory – grandparents, school yards,
car wrecks, sex – are deconstructing
in the dark, and on pages just like this.
The gestures of my dying are rehearsing
there, you know, beyond the sky
and the mind, already breathing, born.

Kyle Kimberlin
3^rd Draft, 7/22/06

[2^nd draft posted 1/11/06]

Sometimes, picking up a newspaper or accessing the TV or Web news is like stepping out of the dugout with your favorite bat, tapping it across the plate, and looking up to face two or three or five pitchers. Just when I thought I was getting a handle on the madness in Israel, here comes another pitch – high and tight – out of Iraq. One hundred dead civilians, per day, says the NY Times.

BAGHDAD, Iraq, July 18 — An average of more than 100 civilians per day were killed in Iraq last month, the United Nations reported Tuesday, registering what appears to be the highest official monthly tally of violent deaths since the fall of Baghdad. …

This sharp upward trend reflected the dire security situation in Iraq as sectarian violence has worsened and Iraqi and American government forces have been unable to stop it.

Which brings me to some good news for you. The war as we knew it, of the US against Iraq, is over. The Iraqis have stepped up, just as Bush and Rumsfeld promised. They’re running their own civil war against each other now. They don’t need us anymore, so our troops can move on to the next bushcluster. Iran, presumably. Or North Korea. (Feeling il yet?)

I thought I’d mention the end of the Iraq war as we knew it, since you’ve probably been distracted by one or several of the other wars. No need to thank me.

Retaliatory massacres by gunmen and bombers linked to rival Muslim sects have left more than 130 people dead across Iraq over the last two days, the latest casualties of what some politicians now are calling an undeclared civil war.

At least 57 Iraqis were killed Tuesday and scores more injured when a suicide bomber lured a group of day laborers to gather around his minivan with the promise of work before setting off explosives.

I hope our wisdom will grow with our power, and teach us that the less we use our power the greater it will be.

 

-Thomas Jefferson

Don’t miss the latest post on Baghdad Burning.

What’s happening in the middle east is compelling, but if we let it make us blink, They win.

“I wasn’t really trying to feed the dumb animal,” Bush said. “I was just throwing stuff at him to get him to move and one of those things happened to be a fish.”

Ink is handicapped, in a way, because you can blow up a man with gunpowder in half a second, while it may take twenty years to blow him up with a book. But the gunpowder destroys itself along with its victim, while a book can keep on exploding for centuries.

 

-Christopher Morley, writer (1890-1957)

I don’t usually do cuisine on my blog. plenty of blogs are coughing up recipes as it is, don’t you think? But I’m going to share this one, because I can’t try it myself on my present diet, and I don’t want you to miss out on the self-evident bliss.

Pepsi: one 16 ounce bottle
Peanuts: one small bag

Open bottle carefully. Do not shake first. Place on horizontal surface to breathe, while opening package of peanuts. Add contents of peanuts bag to bottle of Pepsi. Serve chilled.

My Dad says he has enjoyed this fizzy, cruntchy delicacy since he was a kid. I’ve seen it before, on fishing trips.

Enjoy!

[photos from camera phone]

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, or somewhere beyond the golden climes of Santa Barbara, you’ve no doubt heard about the upheaval in the snoozeroom of our local paper. The news-press is the oldest daily paper in southern California, published for 151 years. But it seems to have been drawn into the vacuum of moral torpor that has come, in my mind, to be indemic to institutions as the 21st century yawns open.

Some of the best writing on the news-press malestrom can be found, not surprizingly, in the LA times. Like this.

It’s too bad. Some of us native locals have made fun of the paper over the years, calling it the snooze supress and such, because not much happens around here. But that’s a good thing, and it’s less the case recently. It’s growing more common for SB to have it’s share of fresh hell to ponder. And I’ve always thought it was a fair fishwrap for a town this size.

So I hope the newly reconstituted staff can pull it out of the dive, before it spirals in.

* * *

Apropos of which, there was a terrible plane crash southeast of here last week. A family of four from SB. Two killed, mother and young boy. The father and another child survived, but they’re in for a long hard healing. The family dog was in the plane and disappeared. Today, he was found in a ditch near the crash site – alive. … Found by the same two teenage brothers who found the father/pilot last week, and pulled him away from the burning wreckage. Heroes.

I would link you to the story, but I can’t. The SB snooze-mess web site leaves a lot to be desired.