You know you’re making a mistake. You know it--I can see it in your face. And you’re going to go ahead and do it anyway. And that’s fine. Nothing I say will make a difference at this moment. Future pain is no more tangible than remembered pain. Just.... Yes? Take care of yourself, okay? 040807 I like Spotlight. Spotlight is worth... The whole fucking thing. If you Google somebody and they don’t show up, they’re essentially a-- Hey wait! Remember that Piers Anthony book, where it kept saying, “He fibrillated...”? That’s what Googling is like! We’re like that alien! We fibrillate now to find things out and investigate things, like he did! We Google!!! Things to do this weekend: Finish the certification stuff Finish the application stuff Beat drug addiction Become expert on Walt Whitman Get groove back Tighten pecks & abs, lose flab GLORIOUS REBIRTH through sanguine marriage of technology and folksy warm-hearted wisdom Sex with prostitute People who write about poetry are actually writing poetry. Like it or not. “Most poets compromise between the diction of the poems they love, often centuries old, and the language they hear in the streets....” Lo, tru dat! (http://www.nytimes.com/2007/04/08/books/review/Logan.t.html?ex=1333684800&en=8f9de5d587a7ff76&ei=5088&partner=rssnyt&emc=rss) FOrget where I heard this, but can’t say it often enough: Broken things are strong; things about to break are stronger still. 4/12/07 Click, Adam Sandler movie, it’s dumb-cute-predictable-same-old, and yet, and yet, there’s a reason this kind of fluff appeals. Cuz it’s true. Even at the ripe old prime of my middle age without a dream in this world, some part of me (and you) desperately, desperately needs to wake up in a bathrobe, leaving the wife confused for the moment at home, bicycling across a suspension bridge of titanic proportions, on the way to disrupt a routine that’s been killing me with bland success for one year after another. Here I wanted to be so wise and hurt. Here I wanted to be steeped in grief like every other two bit celebrity out there that can’t do a god damned thing about the war. Here I thought I was so careful not to act like I was wise, and you know what? I’m still a god damned fool for all that. I was mad about the kids, trying to get them buckled into the van, and it was hot, and I’m a fucking idiot, and my mom said gently, gently because that’s what she is, that’s what she’s always been with me, even when I couldn’t hardly stand it, she said, “Someday they’re going to be thirty.” And I acted like I understood, I smiled like I understood but you have to realize it’s hot out here and I’m sweating and we have a long fucking way to drive, and I get what you’re saying, and I know, I know, I appreciate them, as soon as we get home I’ll stop and we’ll play a game or something, but what she was really saying was, as soon as you get home it’ll be too late. They’ll already be too old to play Hi Ho Cherry-O. They’ll be teenagers and they won’t give a damn about the totally meaningless random rolls of the dice and they won’t give a damn how many cherries are in their basket, or worse, they will give a damn and they’ll be upset because they don’t have enough, and you will have said later, I’ll play that stupid, pointless game with you later, and you’ll hear yourself saying it, and you’ll know it sounds like a dumb story about some dumbass that always says later, but that’s not you, you’re just saying it this once, and by the time you actually do get around to sitting down and playing it with them it really will be pointless. That’s what she was saying, you god damned stupid son of a bitch. Now go fill out the forms and give them a drop of your blood and get a job. And quit acting like it’s such a big deal, because it isn’t. It’s only, as some other jackass who thought he had to be so fucking wise figured out, life after all. You know, you say “predictable” like it’s a bad thing, but shit. Shakespeare used the same stories and characters over and over again, and we’re all fucking gaga over his shit. He knew something about plain old ordinary people, that’s what he did. There’s just a hell of a lot more of us around, now. I guess grandma lily was right about me after all. 4/12/07 In 1996, I said, “To conjure something ALL YOU HAVE TO DO is focus on it, concentrate on it so that you can REALLY SEE it, REALLY FEEL it in your mind.” I wonder how many of us--myself included--really know how to do that any more. 042407 Okay. It’s finally happened. The new has finally caught up to the old. It took a brand freaking new Intel MacBook, Tiger, and 2 GB of RAM, but OS X is finally as fast and responsive as the Classic Mac OS was. Freakin’ finally! * Yay! It’s also here: y’know how they state the location at the beginning of a news story: SACRAMENTO, California -- The mayor of blah blah did dbaldjha sld and so on. Well I just read one that started out: SILICON CITY, Second Life -- Blah blah blha, dfsdf. Wee!!!!!# 042607 What good is an army of pigeons & little stones against a hulking, totalitarian blimp/glacier/brain-fuck-net? We’ll see. The bane of the grown-up writer: Always trying to turn every impulse into some recognizable, precedented form. Eventually this habit leads to supression of all ideas, as the recognizable forms reveal themselves as not worth replicating. 042707 All these people who are so quick to point out that the numbers of casualties in Iraq pale in comparison to some of our past wars: Does that make the current situation okay? Since we’ve had other disasters and tragedies in the past, does that set a standard for number of people it’s okay to destroy before we need to worry about changing our plans? What the fuck? And when our little capsule of everything gets old again, re-enter SMOKE on its ugly rat-wings, parodying taking us away.