Dad got a plane from the UPS guy the other day. An early Christmas present from Mom I guess. It has an air-propelled, single piston engine and Styrofoam wings. We took it to the park by the beach. I got some pictures with Dad’s phone.

If you look closely in these pictures, you’ll see The Spot , which has some of the best burgers on the planet. I don’t go there, because I don’t want to get hooked on the damn things. Sooner or later, the relationship would have to end badly.

The brown house to the left of the Spot is The Old Hotel, now a private home. People used to say it was haunted. I doubt it. Why would a ghost hang out in a house that close to the ocean, when it could just haunt the beach? … Come to think of it, maybe it was the garden that was haunted. That makes more sense.

Dad went by himself today and flew the little plane again. Said it almost got away on the wind. Climbed a couple hundred feet, over the Spot and the Old Hotel, and landed in the middle of the street. All glory is fleeting.

An interview here with singer/songwriter Richard Buckner. I keep searching, hoping someone will post lyrics so I can get a better grip on them. Some are like my poetry, others like my fears.

While our moral hysteria marginalizes and disenfranchises swaths of our society, our moral values leaders are doing their damnedest to leave a choking wasteland for the children to live in. This isn’t some pie-in-the-sky vague warning, friends. The sky isn’t falling; it already has. The Republican controlled Congress, and the barely self-controlled president, are eviscerating decades of environmental laws as we sit in our comfy chairs right now.

I can understand wanting to move the gays to the back of the civil rights bus. It’s not like this is a country that claimed to stand for tolerance and inclusion. Freedom … humbug! We’re cowboys, not interior designers. But the environment, people, is where we live. It’s not just what goes on in the places we can see from the places where we go on vacation. It’s all one web, and anything we let them do in the places on Discovery Channel has real effects right on our block. Besides, if you think you don’t have some sort of ecological disaster going on within a bike ride of your house, you’re confused.

What are we going to do about this? We tried getting a new president and that didn’t work. Any ideas?

Have you ever loved someone so much that you couldn’t stand the thought of losing them? But you knew you were going to, and it was going to tear you up. But maybe you could make a deal … Oh God, please let me keep this dog.

Ever feel left behind by life, alone in the world, empty-hearted, with nothing but your memories? Ever feel like your memories are haunting you? Or maybe you are haunting them.

Do I still have your attention? Thank you. On my Web site, there’s a page of my writing. Poetry and very short stories. I’ve just described The Guy who Wanted a Dog and Garden Window. You’ll find them there. I promise there is nothing on that page that takes more than 5 minutes to read. Hope you like it.

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.