Anne Lamott is one of my favorite writers on writing, thinking and Being. Oh yes, much more fun than Heidegger. Last night, I turned to her book Bird by Bird for insight into the moral reality of the book I’m writing. Here are a few snippets from page 108 of her book:

So a moral position is not a message. A moral position is a passionate caring inside you. We are all in danger now and have a new everything to face, and there is not point gathering an audience and demanding its attention unless you have something to say that is constructive and important. … So write about the things that are most important to you. Love and death and sex and survival are important to most of us. Some of us are also interested in God and ecology.

Maybe what you care most passionately about are fasting and high colonics …. That is fine, but we do not want you to write about them; we will secretly believe that you are simply spiritualizing your hysteria. There are millions of people already doing this at churches and New Age festivals across the land.

The brilliance goes on. No kidding; I’d love to quote the rest of the chapter, but I think I’ve gotten enough fair use out of it, and I’d rather you bought the book. Writers gotta eat.

Like tech jargon? You’re going to love this funny video.

Thanks to Chuck for sharing this.

It’s a rainy night here in Santa Barbara. Do you know how rare that is? Well, it is. We don’t get much rain here, and it’s caused all hell to break loose.

My poor parents. Apparently, my home phones chose this rainy evening to go kerflooie. They won’t ring. They work, but no ringing. And when I got home tonight, not knowing this, I forwarded my cell phone to my home number. (I do this so I can put the cell away, and still answer calls made to it.)

So they couldn’t reach me, and got worried, and showed up here at the Sky Condo in the cold and drizzly night. Sorry, Mom & Dad! … Got a guy coming Wednesday to fix it.

My blog was down for a few hours tonight. I still don’t understand it: I couldn’t publish, except once, which it published without any posts. I was feeling forlorn; we get accustomed to entering the world in certain ways. I knew the rest of you were more sane and deep asleep. But I’m used to being able to do this, and I’m proving now that even if I have nothing to write about, I like to know that I can.

I was seriously taking another look at the MSN blogging site, and I even updated my old blog-city blog to make sure it still works.

Anyway, I thought I’d lost all my posts and had a dead blog on my hands, but it’s OK now I guess. And since I am a poet, here’s a poem for you.

I’ve updated my Web site. I think it’s cool; see what you think.

Well, I wandered over to MSN and checked out the new Spaces blogging tool. Just for the halibut. Here’s what I did: http://spaces.msn.com/members/oldspeak/

It was pretty quick and slick, though their server response was a little balky in spots. Overall, I don’t like it. It was a little like eating cold clam chowder. Which is also the feeling I get from hotmail. You can change the layout of modules, and drag and drop them. But you can’t get at the html template and make major changes to the total page, like you can on blogger.

I believe I’ll be staying here, and watching the clash of the titans – Google and Microsoft – from this side of the fence.

A while back, I wrote about a song , a moon and a man named Ariel. Tonight I have news that the book by that name, by Sylvia Plath, has been restored and published. A reading of it was held in New York.

The story of this book is simply that of people in pain. Don’t look away, poets.

The Secretary of State has said this to the Washington Post, about Iran:

“I have seen some information that would suggest that they have been actively

working on delivery systems … You don’t have a weapon until you put it in

something that can deliver a weapon.”

And this he also said:

“There is no doubt in my mind … they have been interested in a nuclear weapon

that has utility, meaning that it is something they would be able to deliver,

not just something that sits there.”

Mr. Powell, are you out there? Hello? [Rapping urgently on Monitor and waking dog.] May I ask a question? Are you batlooney? The asshats blowing up our Army and Marine convoys in Iraq aren’t having any trouble delivering their explosives. They just leave them sitting there, until our people go by, then BOOM.

I realize Powell is referring to nukes. But he doesn’t think a resourceful group of Iranians could get a nuke on a truck fairly close to US in Qatar or Kuwait, or our friends in Jerusalem?

Two parting shots before I totter off to bed:

I used to have an old Mercury that was gradually, incrementally, costing me more than the whole car was worth. Someone said “you ought to replace it.” I said, “I am. One part at a time.” I see now we were wrong about being wrong about WMD in Iraq. They got ‘em alright; we’re just discovering them a little at a time. If over 1200 young dead and at least 10,000 wounded isn’t mass destruction, I don’t know what is. And that’s not even getting started on the WMD we’ve unleashed on them.

It seems Powell isn’t content to go out with a Whimper; he’s definitely got a preference for Bang.

Tomorrow apparently is the debut date for MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s new blogging service. [News Link]

Ain’t competition a wonderment? I’ve been on Blogger since March 03, around the time the war started. Before that, I was on Blog City for a short time. I don’t have a problem with Blogger, though there are times when their servers bog down and I want to scream. I’m interested to see what Gates’ Geeks have concocted. But I’m not in a mood to make a change. I’m well rooted here, and setting up new digs is such a pain.

Believe it or not, I had an idea for the general format of blogging before I found out that blogging existed, or saw my first blog. I wanted to have a page on my Web site, maybe an easily- updated html file, for musings on Life, the Universe, and Everything. It should, I thought, be like a journal but upside down, with the latest entry on top. It was a major hassle to set up something that was easy to upload, and could be done in Word not WYSIWYG. Then I saw Pete’s blog and boom: I got my blog, and with it another way to kill an evening without getting drunk or … hmm, this is a family blog … getting horizontal.

Spaces will probably suck, and give you no storage, like Hotmail. Wanna bet?

Well, I managed to make my mortgage payment today, having found the bill last night. I was sitting at the table, about to write the check, when I noticed that the loan company had a Web site. There was a notation that I could pay online. How thoughtful!

So down the hall I went to the computer. Got myself all registered with a clever password, had my banking information in the little blanks and the cursor poised over the Submit button.

Hey just a galldarn minute here, says I. That final payment amount looks wrong. Checking the hardcopy bill, I see it’s $10 more. You know where this is headed, don’t you? Right. Squinting in disbelief at the monitor, I see there’s a $10 service charge for doing it online.

Does this make sense to anyone? I’m doing all the data entry, saving them having to sort and open my mail, route and endorse and deposit the check and everything. All they have to do is download and update a batch file or something. It’s all computerized on their end. They should be paying me!

Needless to say, I mailed it. They can kiss my big fuzzy pink wahzoo. And from now on, I’ll use Yahoo Billpay. That way, they still get paper, but I don’t have to mail it. … Nyahhaha.

What good is conservatism that doesn’t conserve? The environmental vanguard are gearing up for Bush’s 2nd term assault on our environment. They shouldn’t have to. The government should be on our side, not in the hip pocket of the polluters. It’s a shame, and our grandchildren will look at old photos of the world we knew as children and think of us with shame.

This is still very timely. From Lincoln’s State of the Union, in the midst of the Civil War.

“The fiery trial through which we pass will light us down, in honor or dishonor,to the latest generation. We say we are for the Union. The world will not forget that we say this. We know how to save the Union…In giving freedom to the slave, we ensure freedom to the free—honorable alike in what we give, and what we preserve. We shall nobly save, or meanly lose, the last, best hope of earth.”

— Abraham Lincoln, 1862