I just found out it’s Jack Kerouac’s birthday. In honor of which, the title poem from my collection, Finding Oakland. I had been reading On The Road – and evidently Crime & Punishment too – and was inspired. I still can’t read the last paragraph of On The Road without being moved, sometimes to the verge of tears. The man had a way with words.
The epigraph was used with permission of Stella Kerouac. Really. It’s good to get permission and not just take.

FINDING OAKLAND

            “because here we were dealing with the
            pit and prune juice of poor beat life itself
            in the god awful streets of man.”
                                                            Kerouac

In my heart, I have come back to
San Francisco, which sprang up
on the edge like a condemned man’s
last meal, where patience and action
are futile. I have come to kneel
where only prayer is valid.

In the Steinhart Aquarium, my brother
longed to swim in the cool peace.
In a dream I saw him on the BART,
plunge beneath the bay, searching
for water. But he rose up,
finding Oakland. He stepped
from the train, saying “we are
like men who have lost their legs.”

 In a dream I saw him walking
south on Mission Street, turning
into an alley and a dark pawnshop.
Like poor Raskolnikov, the price
was just too high. The fog
lingered about the hills, anointing
the housetops, hanging from street lights.

Then Jesus rose up through the steam
in the street, parting the traffic,
leveling light on everything.
Dragging the curtain torn in two.
An army of angels marched
down from Bolinas,
swinging the broken chains.

Artist suspends real clouds in the middle of the room.

Follow that link to a page about an artist who creates real clouds indoors, for a moment, and photographs them. It's interesting. And here's an old poem.

CLOUD

We speak of life as an oboe
speaks, in Summer colors
stirring the orchards
playing the windchimes by the door.

You put the telephone down
and your voice hangs
a little cloud of new rain
over the cold and restless sea.
I cannot hope to disconnect.

How can a man admit he loves
so well, so hopelessly
these clouds that only turn
maybe hover
do not descend, never touch.

Now birds are rising in the dial tone
with a motion as still and breathless
as the respirations of a dying seal.

A squadron of great brown pelicans
is lifted from the harbor
to investigate the coming night.

If they will watch the sky for me
maybe I can sleep.

"It couldn't be avoided:" a comic strip for you.

Yep, that's a metaphor if I've ever seen one. Just who's been wielding the shovel, anyway?

They're very useful, even in the kitchen.

This week Metaphor is sending out special welcomes to readers from Jakarta, Jawa Barat in Indonenia; to Perth in Western Australia; to Lakhnau, Uttar Pradesh in India and to someone from the brightly equine wilds near King, North Carolina.

That's just a few. Folks stopped by from Mountain View, CA – the home of Google – to Fryeburg Maine – home of Dearborn Tubular and Fryeburn Academy. (Ain't Wikipedia great?) And Middletown, Connecticut, which just sounds perfect. 

Greetings, Namaste, and Howdy. I hope you found what you were looking for, or something just as good. And I hope you'll stop by again.

I listened to this Marketplace Tech Report podcast this afternoon.

The main topic of the episode was Google's new privacy policy, but I enjoyed a digression about design. John Moe made some excellent points about the web sites we love and the simplicity that we love about them.

Our favorite simple and elegant things on the Net – e.g., Gmail – become more complicated because smart people like to build things.

More complication means less lovable.

Facebook is probably hopeless, but maybe somebody could get a message through to Google about G+ and G-Docs: leave the good stuff alone.

I recommend the podcast.

There’s been a lot of conversation this week about the new Windows 8 preview. Personally, I’m not buying it. Not yet.

I’ve come to care less about the pretty skin of a system and more about how it helps me communicate and get things done. I was an early adopter of Office 2010 Beta, which as it turned out doesn’t really do anything that Office 2003 can’t do. It’s just prettier with its ribbons.

A computer is for computing. The operating system should facilitate computing, or you may as well give your devices to the baby to play with. Or the cat.

In the case of Windows 8, little of the week’s conversation, within my hearing, has been about computing. It’s been about set dressing. Metro and Aero. And a lot has been written about getting back features and functions of Windows 7. 

Here we have a very nice page on the How To Geek site, about how to get the start menu back in Windows 8.

Why would you put a new operating system on your computer, if you’re planning on struggling to get back the features of the old operating system? If the new differences aren’t what you need and want, why not keep the system you have?

Eventually, everyone who is installing the 8 preview is going to have to pay for the retail version, or go back to 7. It’s not free. So before I installed it, I would be asking some serious questions, for example:

If I don’t decide to pay for Windows 8, how much of a hassle is it to get my Windows 7 back?

How much is it finally going to cost?

What does it do that Windows 7 can’t do? And I mean distinct operations, not cool methods or little convenience tricks.

Is the file management system an improvement over the Libraries in Windows 7?

Will it come with Office 2010 installed? Or will it just be one of those evil 60 day trials? (I know the answer to this.)

You may be wondering, “But Kyle, don’t you want to play with it, try it out? Look, it’s got gestures instead of just clicks and drags and stuff.”

Sure I do. I’m curious, I like gadgets. But when the day is done we’ve either got stuff done or we haven’t. Our devices have either helped us or not. We should try to be practical about our electronics needs, and keep in mind that Microsoft and companies like it are constantly innovating to take our money, not to improve our lives. That’s as it should be, so judging the value is up to us, not them.

If you missed my set of photos of the tulip in winter, here's another chance. Very pretty!

And here's the poem by e.e. cummings, that goes with the photo.

I had a friend and roommate in college, who liked to take a quiet break from time to time and be alone and think. He called it, “taking a journey within,” or something like that. He was a very thoughtful young man, attentive to the states of his consciousness.





I don’t know what he daydreamed about, because he seemed to have set a boundary there, which I respected. If he were with us still in what we call being alive, I would ask him. We would both be men well into the sparser woods of middle age, with fewer reservations. And we would have been friends for many more years by now. So he might tell me.


On those rare occasions when I can get my monkey mind to stop jabbering and throwing metaphorical poo, I take such journeys myself. Into memory, mostly: Walking down a certain dark street in a city in which the rain has just stopped, I peer into the dim-lit shop windows where memories are kept. I open the door, a bell tied to the door frame rings, and perhaps I step through into childhood.
 
If that doesn’t work, being a writer I can just make sh*t up. Come to think of it, my little destinations all wind up being stories and poems.
 
Where do you go, on your journeys within? If you don’t want to share, I understand. But I think the interior life is fascinating, and fun to explore. Sometimes you meet old friends.