So it was fast approaching eleven pm when I got this funny idea to take a hot shower. I take my daily shower in the morning, being that kind of guy. My Dad is the kind of guy, by contrast, who takes his in the evening. That’s because he worked for a living; actually worked up a sweat. Gotta respect that, but sometimes at night I get the urge to go to bed extra clean. It helps me relax and sleep. Can you relate?

So I took my shower, and since I live alone and pay the bills I decided to stand for an extra minute or so with my forehead on the white tiles, letting the hot water run on my stressed shoulders, even though I was already clean.

I was nice and relaxed. I got out and dressed in sweats, because I still have to take the doggie out to pee before bed. The thought came to me that tomorrow is the first of the month and I need to pay the mortgage now. It’s just been refinanced, so this is the first month with a new lender. The bill has been waiting on my desk for a couple of weeks. I’d just go ahead and handle it, drop it off at the post office in the morning.

Went to the desk. Guess what was really in the envelope I thought was the bill. Junk mail. An offer to sell me insurance to pay off the mortgage if I croak. Ah Bullshit. It took me 10 minutes to find the real bill, in a stack of crap I was going to feed to the shredder. The real bill didn’t look as real as the fake one. All this killed my happyclean feelgood buzz. I’m about as relaxed as a jackrabbit snagged in a barbwire fence.

I have a stack of mortgage death insurance offers … Why should I give a wet slap about the mortgage if I’m singing with the choir invisible? My folks can sell the casa del cielo, pay off the note, and buy a farm in Arkansas with the equity. I’ll be marching through the afterlife, finding every asshat who sent me one of these these. Then while they’re having a nice hot shower, I’ll sneak in and flush the toilet.

Aaaiieeee!

I think it’s great that Tom Ridge is resigning as chief of the keystone cops. Hope he takes his absurd color chart with him. He has been one of Bush’s flying monkeys of fear, a key cog in the gears grinding up civil liberties. If I never again see him on my TV, calling for general disarray and national panic, it’ll be too soon.

They’re coming to get us! We don’t know where or when or how, and we can’t face up to why, but everybody calmly go about your consumerism in a state of heightened vigilance to this nonspecific, probably imminent threat. Orange! Orange! … What an asshat. So I’m glad he’s decided it’s time to go write his book.

The only problem with all these miscreant minions scuttering out the back doors of power is that All Hat and No Cattle gets to appoint people who are even worse for us. One of the guys up for Ridge’s job was responsible for setting up the Iraqi police. … The first police force in the history of the planet to see 3200 terrified sworn officers desert their posts in a single day. Is it possible Bush could find someone as bad to replace Ridge as he did to replace Ashcroft? There can’t be torture in Gitmo, because the Geneva Convention doesn’t apply. These guys are irregulars, no uniforms. Therefore we aren’t bound to honor the Geneva Convention. This all just keeps getting worse and worse. Anyway, in honor of Ridge’s Orange Terror Alerts, here’s a poem:

Why I am Not a Painter

by Frank O’Hara

I am not a painter, I am a poet.

Why? I think I would rather be

a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg

is starting a painting. I drop in

“Sit down and have a drink” he

says. I drink; we drink. I look

up. “You have SARDINES in it.”

“Yes, it needed something there.”

“Oh.” I go and the days go by

and I drop in again. The painting

is going on, and I go, and the days

go by. I drop in. The painting is

finished. “Where’s SARDINES?”

All that’s left is just

letters, “It was too much,” Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of

a color; orange. I write a line

about orange. Pretty soon it is a

whole page of words, not lines.

Then another page. There should be

so much more, not of orange, of

words, of how terrible orange is

and life. Days go by. It is even in

prose, I am a real poet. My poem

is finished and I haven’t mentioned

orange yet. It’s twelve poems, I call

it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery

I see Mike’s painting, called SARDINES.

I’ve always had an interest in the San Joaquin Valley of California. My folks are from there, and my grandparents lived there until the last of them passed this summer. It’s an amazing place. Not particularly beautiful, but impressive because of what grows there, the agriculture people have built in just a few generations. This article describes the depth of poverty that’s settling on the valley, to a degree I didn’t realize.

Mother Jones Link

The near future of the mediascape … the next progeny of the blogosphere. Got broadband? You gotta see this video. About 8 minutes.

ols-master

Thanks to Joseph

but I’ve posted the first chapter of my novel again. Just click My Novel in the right column.

Now that it’s posted, you people need to quit hanging around my house, saying things like “I’m with the band,” and “I’m his biggest fan in the world.” Those guys out there in the uniforms are gardeners, not bodyguards. And I’m not about to dangle my dog from the balcony.

Chapter two will be along soon enough.

I just want to make sure this quote from John Updike, whom I’ve been reading lately too, gets a little more exposure in cyberspace. I found this on Eschaton.

“We have explored, on behalf of all mankind, this paradox: the more matter is outwardly mastered, the more it overwhelms us in our hearts.”

What do you think?

And by the way, what do you think of the new color scheme for metaphor?

Hey, check this out. This is from my Blogger account profile. Look at the number of words written.

How about that, huh? All sevens. That’s gotta be lucky! Of course, I’m writing more now, so that changes it. And I think Blogger has been having trouble with stats lately, so it’s more anyway. But at some point in my recent blogging “career,” I was one lucky son of a gun. Thank you very much.

“Writing is easy. All you have to do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” — Gene Fowler

That’s write. I mean right. When I was a kid, from about eight, I was into music. Classical mostly. I played Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach on the piano. When I was eighteen, I taught piano lessons to make extra money. And about that time, I started getting into poetry. At first, it was a hard nut to crack, a long hard slog. But before I left college, I learned that poetry could be as simple and elegant and enormously powerful as music. With economy of statement and a free heart, a poet can soar. So I wanted to be a poet.

Can’t make any money writing poetry, can we? So it’s always been a night job, competing with the TV and a thousand other distractions. But I know it takes time and work and commitment.

I’ve written a lot of poems, some stories, the first crappy draft of a novel. Thousands of business letters, memos, legal documents, technical manuals, and essays. And more recently, over 800 blog posts. But you don’t know me; you might find me in Barnes & Noble’s computer for one small book of poems. Despite what Marc Antony implies, I’m not an ambitious man.

My point is this: With all that writing I’ve done, why is it so damably hard to cough up one simple little two page resume? Does anybody else find that the most difficult thing to write on the planet? Wouldn’t you rather sit down with a legal pad and a sharp #2 pencil and hammer out your own eulogy?

…

Later tonight, I’ll be re-posting the draft first chapter of the novel. I know some of you have been getting anxious about that.

Well, that’s that. A holiday goes by pretty fast once it shows up, doesn’t it? I’ve always thought of a holiday as a flashbulb, catching a moment of kodachrome, leaving a gray semi-dark behind it.

Flashbulb is an archaic term. Back in my day, we didn’t have electronic flash yet, let alone digital cameras. You went to the store and bought film and flashbulbs. Well, it’s romantic, but that stuff didn’t work too well, did it?

Mom cooked a fantastic meal. All the trimmings. Wonderful. I dozed off watching football, despite drinking coffee. Same as it ever was.

I was thinking this evening about how thankful I am to live in such a great country, one of the best. It’s like an old and dear grandfather to me. And like so many of our venerable older folks, it’s opinionated, confused, sometimes smelly after a long day, and in dim light often in need of a little helping finding its way.

God bless.

I tried to post this Wednesday night, but Blogger was hosed…

Well, here it is, the eve of Thanksgiving. My memory is working overtime tonight, and … well, it’s making me a little sad. I miss my Grandparents. I loved them very much and they loved me. What more can you ask in life than love like that? I miss some little dogs too. I’m looking forward to Thanksgiving with my folks tomorrow. I’m sure it will be great, but I miss the way it was. Can’t be helped; no fault of mine.

Hey Joe, if you’re reading this, here’s a photo for you. Wish you were here.

[click for biggie]

Earlier this year, my brother Joe and I were driving on a road in Auburn, CA, and were stopped by those turkeys. “None shall pass.” We were stopped there for a good 10 minutes, while they strutted and posed in unison, then finally danced off into the brush. Hope they’re not sitting in somebody’s oven tonight, which is unlikely as they were wild, not gobbling around in a Butterball warehouse. (For the record, I have no problem with the fact that a Butterball reposes in Mom’s oven tonight. I like turkey.)

Here’s a photo for the rest of you.

[click for biggie]

Earlier this evening, I was hanging out at Vons, waiting for my Dad to emerge with some yellow onions for Mom’s stuffing, and just felt like taking a picture. It was a beautiful twilight, don’t you think? Then my cell phone rang. It was Mom and she needed Cool Whip. Dad couldn’t hear his cell in the store, over the din of gobblers. So I had to wade in. Once more into the breach.

My wish for you, if you chose to accept it, is a day of peace tomorrow. May nothing explode in your kitchen. May no one by injured watching football in your living room. May you have just enough pie and thryptophan to doze into the afternoon and worry about nothing.

And may the spirits of all those you’ve loved and lost, who’ve shared your days of football and food — whether at your table or under it — be with you in happy memory.

Yahoo! News Link

OK, now they’re really stretching it. This guy is a grandfather from PA. I’m 10 years younger than he is, and damn glad I never served, because the asshats running this war have no sense, let alone compassion. … Hm, the fact that I never served does mean they won’t call me up, right? I mean, I was in the Boy Scouts. Does that count?