It was a pretty day here in our small town. Sunny and warm. I had coffee with a buddy downtown, and we talked about writing and stuff. You want to see a vignette I wrote last night? You can check it out here. All rights are reserved on that puppy.

My Dad called from Texas, and my brother called from Northern California, to wish me a happy birthday. Mom made us a nice dinner.

Dad said he baited his hook and cast his line off my uncle’s party barge, out on the lake. Leaned the pole up against the inside of the boat. Then he turned to talk to my uncle and some fool fish jerked the whole rig – rod and reel – into the water, never to be seen again. Which explains why he called me from the parking lot of Wal-Mart. How ’bout that, huh? Talk about biting off more than you can chew.

Things are blooming nicely. Here’s a yellow rose from the parental back yard.

click to enlarge

Speaking of blooming, I’m enjoying writing the short fiction pieces – vignettes – that you can find on my Web site. (There’s a link under the gull in the sidebar; click Creative.) They seem to be a natural evolution of the poetry I’ve been writing for the past 25 years. [Holy crap.]

I was thinking this afternoon about how my writing has changed in that time. I no longer feel a need to impress you with obscurity, to pepper my work with allusions to TS Eliot, Dante, and the Grateful Dead. I’m looking for real people, just to catch a glimpse of them; just a snapshot of the human heart. Maybe a tenuous tug on the mysticism of sitting on the tailgate of a pickup truck. Or at your kitchen table, when you suddenly realize you hold the coffee mug just like your grandfather did.

Anyhoo, here’s to me. God grant me many summers.

Happy birthday to me. I’m 44. Mid 40s. Middle aged.
Old enough to know better, too old to miss doing it anyway.

“I have no idea what happened but now I am not the same”
–Pablo Neruda

Congressman John Conyers Jr., a Democrat from Michigan, has a letter on his site calling on the Bush Administration to come clean about the Downing Street Memo and the Iraq war. Wow. The MSM’s ostrich act may not pay off after all.

It’s probably an excellent book. Really. But see, I’m surfing around in writers’ sites and blogs, and I found an excerpt of a novel by Tod Goldberg, which begins:

“From Chapter One

I am haunted by a memory I can’t recall. “

It’s just me, right?

Have you been wondering what software the professional screenwriters use? Well neither have I, but I stumbled on this, and apparently it ain’t MS Word.

A moment of silence in the blogosphere, please, for Eddie Albert, gone to greener acres at the age of 99.

… thank you.

What can I say? I liked that show. I’ll still stop my surfing and watch it. Those were days, boys and girls. … land spreadin’ out so far and wide…. True, we didn’t have shows like Survivor and Elimidate, and 35 flavors of Law & Order and CSI. But when you got up from the TV, you didn’t feel like Alex de Large, like you’d been bombarded with insane, inane images. You felt like you could go on chuckling at little things for a while. Maybe you felt so good, it didn’t matter if you had to climb a pole to answer your phone.

I’m telling you, I was there and TV was happier then. People were happier to be sitting and watching it. And the people who knew how to do that for us are leaving. So let’s hear it for Eddie Albert, for giving us Oliver Wendell Douglas.

f you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth–only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.

-C.S. Lewis

I miss my Dad. He’s off in Texas, visiting his brother and presumably doing some fishing. It’s an annual 3-week trip, and Dad drives back in his Chevy 1500. That’s a big, comfy pickup. He enjoys the drive, prefers it to flying. He’s also stopping by to visit an aunt and uncle in Arkansas.

Which is all cool; I’m glad he gets to go. But he’s my coffee buddy, you know? One of my main coffee buddies, and when he’s not around so we can argue about damn near everything, I miss him.

So here’s a couple of photos of him, which I took last week before he left. There’s him in the pickup, pulling out, and holding Happy the pomeranian. And the little fuzzy thing is Happy’s toy, which I think is a bear.

If that link doesn’t work, go to photos.yahoo.com/j_kyle_1 and click Dad May 05.

In this essay, a writer in the Minneapolis Star Tribune explains that
Bush Lied, and the Press Can’t be Bothered to Report on it .

It’s been three weeks since the Times of London broke the story of the minutes of a meeting of Tony Blair and his cabinet, which prove that Bush lied about the reasons for war with Iraq. Back then, Erik on All That Arises posted about the lack of uptake in American MSM.

Now there’s still nothing significant on this side of the pond, but a still small voice wondering why the 4th Estate is sleeping through this.

As an aside, Erik was looking for a term to reflect the gap between when news breaks overseas and when it’s picked up — or not — by the press over here. How about Uptake Gap?

…who had absolutely no idea that they read Newsweek in Afghanistan? … And who thinks it’s impossible to flush a four pound book down a toilet?

Good safety tip from your friendly neighborhood ex-Boy Scout:

Before starting a deadly riot, first consider the source (when did they start believing the infidel media more than we do?) then consider the physics.

out there. I just wanted to pop in and say I’m not posting much because I’m writing. Since Sunday, I’ve written a short short story and half a chapter for my novel. So please don’t give up. I’m sowing the wind. Then maybe I’ll have something to post.

I remember the tub shower at my grandparents’ house. The bathroom didn’t have a fan and the old sash window was hard to open and didn’t do much good, so the room always steamed up like a sauna. The hot water valve opened counter-clockwise, which is normal. But the cold opened backwards, so you had to be careful. You had to think about what you were doing. After you moved the handled on hot or cold, there was a brief delay, before you lived out the consequences of your choice. But then somebody almost always ran water in the kitchen sink, so you were going to cook anyway.

There was this green soap in the soapdish. It had a strong, familiar scent. It came to smell like being loved, like being in a place where the world didn’t know to go looking for you. It smelled like a home beyond home.

They’re gone. Papa in the Fall of ’02, then Grandma last summer. The house has been sold. I usually use oatmeal or almond soap from Trader Joe’s. But the other day I was seriously out and using the hard-milled hand soap I use at the sink. So I was in the store, and there was Irish Spring, original scent. It was on sale, eight bars for $3.50.

You may as well know the effect is not the same. Here in the condo, the world knows precisely where I am. And venerating these memories will not keep me safe or grant me serenity. I’m riding the rock with the rest of you, as the poor old thing tilts injudiciously into another summer.

At least I smell nice. And here’s a poem from March 2000, in which I mention the soap. Man, 44 cents a bar. You can’t beat a deal like that with a stick, especially when they throw in memories.

CERTAIN STREETS

Time passes, so I get up every morning.
I have soap that smells insanely like spring
in an Irish meadow, with a waterfall.
I take a pill, brush my hair and talk
to the dog while calculating how long
it has been since you called. Seven months,
so I drive to work. The yellow fog burns
back to the water’s edge and leaves
a brilliant path for me. I stay back three
seconds from the cars ahead and listen as
the stock market drops through the morning
light. If time goes on, I have lunch in the park,
where the wind blows debris over the
redwood tables and benches and tall redwoods sway,
ignoring the rough-hewn irony. Everything
hums through the afternoon; computer,
printer, people and lights. At three o’clock
I have coffee, then drive home at dusk
through the city where I see you float,
silk in a cyclone of unremitting weeks.
Should I call? I’m sure there will be time,
some morning, evening, afternoon, when
the clock is resting in a shadow on the wall.

© 2000 by Kyle Kimberlin