Something that was said at the Tuesday meeting last week about the concept that maybe we're supposed be here just to be here & now. For the next man. Which I'm totally in agreement with, because essentially that is what the ultimate fulfillment of the twelve steps seem to be if we are indeed able to create a relationship with a Higher Power & do his will, then it seems that in order to continue to foster that connection, we must work with those about us to maintain a connection to the spiritual. So, the thought was this though, that so long as we assume that our job is to be here for the next man, that we remain "around" because of the fact that we should be here for others, and that in our current state we are in an utmost condition to be of helpfulness to others, we forget that our individual primary purpose is because we have the condition we have. That will not leave us if we are to believe anything that medical science proves about the disease itself. We still have the cautionary states of mind that keep us indisposed from experiencing life on an even plane. And why is this, except that we have previous histories which have dictated this to us, that our experiences with abnormality have changed us from the luxury which came before we ever knew we had a flaw in our condition. There are certain things we have experienced which leave us in a state of unknowing about our future so long as we choose to ingest alcohol or drugs.

Let us not be so drained by the gravity of our personal experiences that we forget the fundamental effects of love on the nuturing of our souls. We are not to be attempting to possess anything that is merely an emotion filtered through our minds, but continuously perpetuating it by the acting with the gift of our spirit.

My Son Volt Greatest Hits Album So Far: 1995-2009

The best band in the world for road trips, hands down. So I got stuck on 1-29 with snow falling down, glaring at the taillights in front of me. I got tired of hard-driving rock n roll, properly stated, and remembered that I had all my Son Volt albums still with me and thought I needed to get back into the Jay Farrar mind set since I had some time on my hands, and the road was still ahead of me. And I have to tell you, they took me home. So this list was my effort at narrowing it down to the best 15. (which I ended up unable to do) And this was not easy because I pulled out my absolute favorite. Then, I turned my focus into ranking so I whiddled it down to the barest essentials. This is even more difficult, you have your truly great timeless songs and mere pearls of musical excellence that Mr. Farrar is perfectly capable of crafting out of sheer effort-driven genius. Thank God for real you don't have to do this, you can take it all just as it comes.

With that I created this list,

Tear Stained Eye (trace)
Methamphetamine (search)
Left a Slide (Straight)
Down to the Wire (acd)
Live Free (trace)
Jet Pilot (okemah)
Afterglow 61 (okemah)
Action (search)
10 Second News (trace)
Cocaine & Ashes (acd)
No More Parades (straight)
6 String Belief (okemah)
Dead Man's Clothes (tremolo)
Wheels Don't Move (acd)
Creosote (straight)
Bandages & Scars (okemah)
Strands (tremolo)
Highways & Cigarettes (search)


Honorable mention: The Search, Out of the Picture (Trace), Been Set Free (Straightways), Mystifies Me (Trace), Flow (Wide Swing) , Ipecac (Okemah), Circadian Rhythm (Search)

This is a method of discipline, it's meant that way anyway. I woke up today, I had laid out a few things for myself the night before, which seems to help. I get off track frequently in the morning. Lately, I'm too entirely obsessed with my appearance, or fear that it won't shake what I hope that it does shake. It's been twelve years since my last drink, officially. I staved it off and I'm glad I did. Why? An image matter. Sally & Bob both had birthdays today, Sally 2, Bob 13. I would have been 12. So it was an image in thinking I might have mixed with the others. Let them have the limelight, I figured. I didn't want to get my chip anyway, which is a sign of my current state of mind. I'm haunted by this whole experience of going out with someone at meetings, because now I think every move I make is telegraphed. Like this girl knows exactly what I'm thinking. Like she thinks I'm a zero and therefore, anything I say is feel of crap. My life, how wonderful. In the telescope of my own mind, my life is seemingly undesirable compared with those around me...people who 15 years ago I wouldn't desire their life worth spit. I walked into the rooms thinking I had fallen from grace because I didn't go to Syracuse University and hadn't yet published a poem in the university magazine. Never mind I'd gone completely insane a year before. Never mind that I had made an almost complete comeback from being given Thorazine to calm my nerves enough to be in therapeutic groups. It wasn't that bad but it had been bad enough.
So today was anticlimatic because I felt like I wasn't matching up. I had nowhere to turn seemingly. I stood on the porch trying to look unaffected. I am affected, instead. That's the true reality of the situation. Why it plagues me I have to look at again. I guess it's the whole thing I keep saying. I'm not living well with others. I act erratically from time to time. Like tonight, I'm afraid to look her in the face because of the rejection I felt a few weeks back. I went farther than I know I should have, trying to force a response from someone, now I just don't know what to do, so I do nothing. I smile. I act kind but really I just want to make her feel something like the hurt that I felt by just being tossed aside. This is resentment. My pride wounded. My personal relations affected. I could say that I was paying attention which I was until that pluperfect moron. started talking emotively about how he had gone out of his way to talk to someone "not like him." Hold yourself up as a fuckup and people applaud it, they talk about the way that they hate who they are because they... well, anyway, I'm sitting there and thinking this has absolutely with the topic at hand..and they are straying from an entirely viable topic. Something pertinent.
So something has crept in and stolen my paradise. You can say that you allowed it to happen. But I didn't allow myself to get affected, I just was. I was excited, and maybe wrongly so because at the time, things didn't properly make sense. But out of pride and ego, I went after something that couldn't be forced. I wanted someone to notice me, so I went after it. One of the reasons I shrug away from the social scene there is because it smacks entirely of being on the in-crowd. Christ, even Bill suffered feverishly from this particular malady, and he did not parade it as something that was a sought after virtue. Of course, it's natural to desire camraderie. It happens at practically every meeting you'll ever go to. The clique that forms. Truthfully, I probably would fall more in line with the gang on Wednesday, the real freaks, the social niggers of the lot. Not that I am, I just have always struggled with where I fit into the mix. This is a matter of feeling. A feeling of fear, a fear of being not quite what others are looking for, despite myself. An intense and innate desire to connect, and prove myself. It's as if you have to prove yourself. And I've always climbed the mountain to where I can display my ability to measure up to others standards. SO I can fit in. So I can be a proven commodity. Earn your way to the top. So this is what I find myself doing now. And because you take yourself so damn seriously, people see that. They see right into that shit and the natural inclination is, for that kind, for that arena, to just let you be. Because you're so damned use to trying to make others look your way, and if they do, seize the opportunity as a sign. So if they look your way it's a blessing, but if they don't then you are accursed. How are we ever going to survive the daily ups and downs with that mental attitude. The emotional rollercoaster of trying to please others and keep them happy with you. Of wanting to be adored at all times.
So this is what is happening now. Mostly because I simply want to keep the party going even now.

Just haven't found it very rewarding...which isn't totally true in the grand sense of how it's said. After thinking about this for a few moments I realize the selfishness of such a statement but I'm developing a bit of bitterness over the last couple weeks. It stems from the recent situation where yes, I met a woman who rocked my world. Rock n Roll Jen. And that was a lingering flash in the pan seemingly. I think she just wanted to go out. And that was it. She wanted to have a little fun and go out with a guy she knew & who was maybe safe? Enter me. Didn't help that I kind of looked at her like a rock star. I mean I know it doesn't benefit either one of us to look at it that way. But yeah, I put her on a pedestal and have for a long time because she has all the characteristics of what I like in a person and in a lot of ways the person I want to be more likke.... I mean, she's not perfect, she can't be. But at the same time, it was like maybe the green one's coming round. Because like TJ said, I'm not looking for a perfect woman, I want someone I'm attracted to, someone I feel comfortable with and ultimately, and more importantly, someone who is interesting. I worried for a good 24 -72 hours about whether I was interesting enough. Hell, I've worried about that since I don't know when... you just never feel like you're interesting enough for the rest of the world. Not for potential employers, not for your social circles, not for the women you're really interested in dating... but you keep going along as though, maybe by some mad circumstance you are going to meet someone in the right place at the right time... etc etc. People say well, why complain about them? It just hit me that actually there is no point in complaining about them... it is what it is and really, this is still about pride for me. This is still also about self-image. About how I view myself versus how I view the world. Maybe we just need reminders that it is okay to just let things roll with the punches....
For instance, it was actually good to hear John say that he was doing okay despite his recent escapade with joblessness, well, really the bedevilments, in general that he was really over it...things did change for him... he found some temporary work that was flexible and paid well, and even got to buy a new car so he could have transportation when he needed it. But he seemed to have gotten through a hurdle and decided he wasn't going to let pervading circumstances determine his present happiness. What makes him happy is hard to say. Not really my place to say but he has actually been on the down side for a long time, and I recgonized that I wasn't always the supportive friend I could have been for someone in that place.... it isn't easy I know when you're in the muck... I think I have been suffering from that old feeling like the shoe is going to drop. Really drop. We live toward distraction of that anymore I think... the fear of what's going to come or what might not come... the fear of what is possibly going to crash down around us... whether it be the ceiling coming down to the tune of thousands of dollars, the microwave exploding and starting a fire in the kitchen...

Blue Light Lounge Sutra For The Performance Poets At Harold Park Hotel -Komunyaaka

the need gotta be so deep words can't answer simple questions all night long notes stumble off the tongue & color the air indigo so deep fragments of gut & flesh cling to the song you gotta get into it so deep salt crystalizes on eyelashes the need gotta be so deep you can vomit up ghosts & not feel broken till you are no more than a half ounce of gold in painful brightness you gotta get into it blow that saxophone so deep all the sex & dope in this world can't erase your need to howl against the sky the need gotta be so deep you can't just wiggle your hips & rise up out of it chaos in the cosmos modern man in the pepperpot you gotta get hooked into every hungry groove so deep the bomb locked in rust opens like a fist into it into it so deep rhythm is pre-memory the need gotta be basic animal need to see & know the terror we are made of honey cause if you wanna dance this boogie be ready to let the devil use your head for a drum

I'm not sure what's hitting me right now... it feels like this blazing force, like a comet that surrounded me and has been sweeping me away from this dimension. It is as if I've been drawing people into my circle, like I'm a magnet (no, not a chick magnet but yes, at times) and the people I want near me are coming near me. My motives are terrible. I think about how I was a seeker, and how I simply went after what I wanted and either it was granted or not granted. That simple. To some extent, it is still like that with me, but now it's something different. Either you believe in divine power or you do not. And if you believe, as some do, that that power is really driving the bus, then you wait for lightning strike, and if you believe that way, as some do, then you realize that lightning doesn't strike more than once. But if you're in a good place for things to come to fruition lightning strikes all the time, and if you're ready you can take advantage of the brilliance of what's being created around you. My motives are terrible, looking indirectly for personal gain, I begin to question again my own understanding of human relationships. Who is a friend? How does a friend behave? Isn't it more than simply enjoying people's company but furthering the relationship by offering up whatever you have at that moment to give someone a hand, to really help them, lend them an ear, listen. Or it could be they are looking for support, they are looking for you to validate their ideas, or to write off their worst fears as foolish, because they have an inherent worth beyond their worst fears. This is an offering that you can grant to a friend. I've never been exactly where I want to be more than I am right now. Probably when I was 15 years old, surrounded by good friends and fielding good rapport, I struggled with that, I struggled with success, of being liked. Even then I remembered what all of it was for, how or why i deserved to be accepted, when I had never been accepted for anything. When I was rising out of failure, and instead of shrinking back into the background, I chose the higher ground, which was to use it for decadent gain. Not so much as it presented itself, but still, I thought suddenly I could have it all. What disappointment. Because I ceased just being as I was, as being exactly where I wanted to be at the moment. I asked for more. I went out and grabbed at it, and ground the links into the dust. For more. I don't want to ask for more right now, because I seem to be in a place where I'm just in the middle of the whirlwind, not really understanding it all, but knowing I just don't want all of it. I couldn't believe when a woman I have long had an affinity and respect for just broke over her own lines, and asked me too hang out with her. It took me by surprise entirely because I haven't been expecting much really, I just know good things are happening when I'm patient, when I stay in the moment and open myself up to those things. I don't think of this as forever, not by any stretched, but it's an opportunity to exercise what seems to be working for me, and that's to try to be myself as best I can. To try to bring out the good in people, or bring out the personality that they want to display, to comfort people even if just give them an environment with which to be comfortable. It's what I absolutely love right now, this experience of being able to step out of my comfort zone even if just for a moment, and go with what I've got.
The antithesis of all this is I'm just a people pleaser. I don't want people to be mad at me, I don't want them to not like me. I'm obsessed by this possibility and yet, every day I talk to people who seemingly do not care about anything but their own agenda... even working at a job, which pays them much more than I will ever get from my current position, they still think of how to wrap everything around their wants & desires. This is the way of the world for (most?) I don't keep a planner, in fact have never in my life kept a planner. Nor have I ever felt I needed a planner. Maybe now it's getting close to that, but it seems like a female thing. An obsession with knowing where you are going. So maybe it's good to begin planning things. We all know plans fall through. My plans certainly fell through somewhere between 2008-2009. The whole fucking thing just split apart... I couldn't think out three weeks at all. Right now, there is no need. I do go where the day takes me. Sometimes I plan out a couple days, I determine a weekend. I keep appointments (doctors, therapists, concerts, vacations) and if people ask me to outings, I arrive. I'm terrible with birthdays, which is odd because I'm coming up on one. What if everyone I know forgot my birthday, weddings are the same way, and what if everyone forgot or simply decided they didn't want to go to my wedding.
Anyway, more and more, I am seeing that this life is about doing what you want. I am frightened about the next step for my career... As I took this shift which doesn't have me go into work until 10:30 in the morning, I stay up late and wonder about where my life is headed. About what the next step for me should be. I almsot had a melt down at work today because of lack of communication, letting emotion creep into the work where no emotion is really required. I'm getting sucked into the drama of the vicissitudes of working the rat race. And yet, that is what this enterprise requires. I hear it every day where people are getting involved in the traveller's bullshit. You knew this when you signed on, is what I think. You complain about criss-crossing the globe, eight cities in two weeks and you don't even see your own bullshit. The bullshit in that place is so thick you need wings to get over it. But it pays well, certainly. It pays well and I'm not clamoring all the time for how I'm going to get my next load of groceries.
So what, me worry? And still I can't separate from that idea that if I am expected at all times to have my shit together then why shouldn't they? If I live with the cost of my inadequacies, why aren't they? Get a clue and call me in the morning. That's what I think. That's where I find myself, insufferably... I am in a place where I think too much without much provocation. I can't "help" it, so I begin to think. Even so, the job is not a long term consideration because I have this alternate plan, which is to gather up a plan. I had this lightning shot this afternoon. I'll get a job teaching in Amsterdam. My hometown. The place where I'm from but have never been in so long. My belief that we all come back to where we begin. Maybe I don't live in town, maybe I don't work in town, because wouldn't that be even better?? Because then I could take the Thruway to work or go out Rte. 30 and head west to some other town and see the sign that says Utica 57, that I grew up with. I wait out the winters and own a small house somewhere in town and know all my neighbors. I'd start a group there. New York. And I'd have summers off and go down to the City and catch ballgames at the Stadium... it was an idea. Like Atlanta. Like Jacksonville. But then came the notion from somewhere else, it's not where you are, it's who you're with. Sometimes the truth. Sometimes a lie.

WOW... The closer I get to my birthday, the Scorpion's tale starts to uncurl.

"It may be difficult to tell if you are looking into your future or into your past as your personal history becomes jumbled with your dreams. Avoiding making any major decisions today is probably a good idea, since your perspective is a bit distorted by your subjectivity."

His mind was at it again, without defense. He didn't know where thoughts came from, whether they welled from some dark place in his subconscious, whether they were caused by chemicals that lurked in even darker recesses of his body. He could almost picture his liver making a hiccup and blurting a small stream of bile which eventually made its way to his brain, and coagulated there. End this, evade other things, disproportionate perspectives. If everything he knew about his condition was true, he had a disease of perception, meaning that he saw the world through a convex glass.

He knew he was no different from any man who ever walked the face of the planet... but some men knew their destiny without batting an eye. They never questioned it, some men never even looked into the glass of tomorrow. But, he had to wonder whether others had people around him, the females wanting to know what tomorrow would bring, or the next five years, the next three months and no sooner. Could we see each other together? How was he supposed to know in any respect? Just trying to make it through the day was the unanimous response, and it seemed always would be. It seemed. Like he could never make it past the end of the week. He'd plan to see shows. He'd plan vacations, but the filler... the filler was for the present...unfilled. You could color it in with crayons. He seldom made commitments ahead of time, because, well, you just never knew.

He remembered driving home from a friend's house during the late summer of 1994, the thought crossed his mind that he had the rest of his life yet to live, but nothing like what he had been through with 12 years of schooling would ever restrict him again. He could be who he wanted to be. But there was a sagging inward. Who else could he be but what he had always been? How could he proceed forward? How could he get Beyond... he didn't know, so when you don't know you start to think that the best option is to wait, wait until the answer finally came. Nothing about searching but waiting for the thing to just be placed into the plam of his hand. 15 years later, the philosophy hadn't totally changed. He'd been averted into believing that you had to reach out and take what you want to. Just don't be disappointed if it doesn't always yield. But he had to try. He had to put some mustard behind it.

So there's still an element of that befuddlement still in the way he thinks... he had a concept that worked for him for a while, a way of keeping his head about him, his wits... he imagines himself walking on the side of a country highway, the kind he was used to seeing in his early days visiting upstate New York. They wind around and get hidden by trees, but all that is of no consequence. Instead, it was the sensation of cars rushing by, the wind whipping in the back. See, the truth is that he has no more an idea of anything that's coming than anybody else. The smartest, most insightful people may be able to predict what will happen given a set of circumstances and maybe they can predict with some kind of accuracy, but they can't account for the right or wrong people showing up at the right or wrong time. You can never truly account for that and why would you? That would take all the pleasant surprises out of your life, and then you might as well perch on a wheel and start walking... So it is with watching the cars go by, you just have to let them go, without any warning, no matter which way you time the pattern, the cars just come by, but the only thing you can choose to do is watch them as they continue down the road... or not pay them any mind, just the red tail lights blend into the scenery and the sun continue to set and the cool breeze begin to pick up, the air dense, the crickets loud, the weeds rustling and the pines, and the pines....

This ordered universe, the same for all, no god nor man has made, but it ever was and is and will be: fire ever living, being kindled in measures and in measures going out. Heraclitus

Labor Day. Never aptly named in anyway whatsoever. I am laboring through my labor... this is hardly labor, and no, I am not just making a play on words. Dave Marty found an old poem of mine, Killing Roaches with Strunk & White's Elements of Style... a poem which grabbed its first readers mostly due to its title. You understand fundamentally that the title of a poem will always grab the reader the most, because every one who comes across will be interested in what it has to say. And whether or not you have had anything to say about the topic. Or what creative energy you have pooled to force people to think. So what was the deal behind Strunk & White, it was about my first true feelings of turmoil, about struggling as the common man struggles, about falling from grace into one's own questionable decisions. But there was always a controversy around whether roaches were either metaphorical or real, in which case, the autobiographical reality was that they were very real. I can still look back at those hours of dread, coming home to find those amber colored insects perched on table tops or loping their way along the carpet... and the book which allowed me the most flexibility in terms of range and (how else can you call it?) flappability... long and taut enough to create a window of impact that would obliterate the dirty, sandy creatures... But even heavier-looming was the collapse of a long wonderful relationship I had with my ex-girlfriend... a relationship I had single-handedly dismantled out of the selfish recesses of my mind...

having this new shell of an apartment, a place I was at once both proud of and equally terrified of living in, I wanted to enjoy my new-found freedom, devoid of any real drawbacks... it's startling to think that any women besides those thoroughly invested in me for the long-term would have dared to come into that place. The ones that did were brave... even so, the line "the rift wider & wiser" seemed to fascinate Dave just as much as it did me... the actual writing of the line from the beginning seemed to me a cop-out. the obvious connection was the growing rift I had created, one of a mild alienation between myself and Kate, but the "wiser" connection was that both of us knew exactly what was created there, even if we might have said otherwise, no matter what new oaths I seemed to try to create to make her think that it wasn't so. But while reading Paradise Lost over the winter, as I did so with pleasure, I made the connection of being forsaken by God due to my actions, and condemned into the land of Nod... that atmosphere might not have been mistaken for anything else, dark brown muddy walls, likely painted so to cover up the gaudiness of the place, so that everything blended in unassumingly.

Strunk & White was my shield from that unrest because I cared little for the book. It was my personal version of J. Everett Pritchard that Robin Williams character spoke of in Dead Poets Society, because I never once felt the need to refer to it in order to write scholarly essays... elements of style . The style was there maybe in form but without content. I made it eleven months in that rotten dungeon of a catacomb, with the cockroaches, the spiders, and eventually, the bats. That was the beginning of the end for me, when the bats showed up, no doubt rabid, but also fearless as the one that swooped down, likely disturbed by the "sound" of human beings, maybe the scent of a potential prey to them. But there was also the one on the grate which clicked its talons as it readjusted itself on the metal meshing inside the door... it was straight out of a horror novel and it would consume my waning hours with terror for the next few weeks, and to a lesser degree until the time when I departed some months later... the lease may have been for eleven months, but I turned over the apartment to Christine Gantz, who likely decided shortly after moving in, that she too needed to vacate the premises as soon as possible... One can hardly blame her. It was no place for a woman of her stature, solitary and fearful, to spend long days especially during the summer, no matter how great her desire to "rough it" in the same manner as I did. So she moved on, and no doubt, the place stayed the same... it certainly couldn't have been much more rectified than it already was.

The man upstairs from me listened, I think, to rap music with his wife/girlfriend and their child who cried not constantly but at inopportune moments it seems. One morning, as I got ready for "working the skinny tie" my door opened hastily and the man from that apartment ambled in as if he, in fact, might have lived there. He looked up after a couple steps into the door, and saw me standing there, in the middle of buttoning my shirt. He apologized for walking in, saying that "he didn't know anyone even lived there." I found his statement somewhat plagued by consternation because even if he didn't realize that anyone lived there, what might his purpose have been for walking into an abandoned basement aprtment except for bold curiosity. I only looked at him, mouth agape. Did I need to worry now about strangers passing into my zone unaware, or unthinking about any consequences aurrounding the simple act of walking in, unannounced and helping themselves to unclaimed space to do...precisely what?

At any rate, the humming Emerson was a symbol of the lone creature comforts about the place... I used the refridgerator but it possessed the tendency to overcool and sometimes freeze the items I had stored within... it was not uncommon to come in and find frozen milk cartons on the top shelf, ice shards having formed where the milk should be. I seldom used the shelves, because I was afraid of reaching for a plate only to find a bug attached to the bottom, which would incur me to throw it against the wall. So it went without saying that I kept plates and cups in plain sight, out of the path of hidden insects or so I thought... there was a closet toward the back of the kitchen for storage but I never used that at all... most of my groceries went on top of the refridgerator where I thought it might be safe from all impending intruders. So fear & loathing overcame me... a fear that I would be attacked or caught unaware by unwanted guests. That spine-tingling sensation that I was being watched or on the verge of being singled out. The more I tried not to think about the bear in the corner, the harder I prayed that it not be there should I dare to look. So that was the spawn of Struvk & White, the thick wood out of which the whittle came... a relic of the time when I fell in love with poetry again, as a means of transcendence. Pure experience made surefire again in the hinterlands of the page...the method by which I made sense of it all. By which I felt an inkling of control, immortalizing my plight of killing roaches with pleasure, with disdain, thrashing aging slices of paper through the air to thrust an impact on my world...

Short story seems to be coming but I don't want to let the cat out of the bag just yet. I have to avoid installments lest I run out of steam. Since, to my knowledge no one truly reads my blog, except that I caught Jason Bash reading my Son Volt review (it was all good- it's always good when someone catches your stuff somewhere and enjoys it), I can speak a little to the fact that an ex of mine wrote a few tidbits of her own on her myspace that pertained to our relationship which probably ended something like 2 1/2 years ago.

Immediately, I was shocked by what she had included there because I wondered how long she had held on to her little pearls, believing, of course, that water had gone uner the bridge there. But then you come back into the dark passageways of regret and frrustration that you thought you had neatly paddled away from. I had to pass instead through the stages of anger enough to realize that it was futile, that I was only going to get myself revved up with no chance at resolution. Better to let the water spill off the duck's back. Even so, I had to understand the natural progression of my own, at times, tendency to take the first response to a slight. It may have been a slight after all, but was it worth my time. Is it ever really worth my time? Has it not cost me already much in life that I might otherwise have been able to enjoy? I am Jack's raging bile duct.

She sat in the room holding yarn, she had done herself up to look like a dedicated mother, knitting a sweater for him, only she had started a few days late. I driven him somewhere a thousand miles, he was chirping on & on about how he was going to see his mother. I had told him as much because it was the truth. She was his mother. Now for four years or something like it.

I gave him his birthday cake just three months prior to this. He had gleamed with a cone-shaped hat that was multi-colored, festive with craypaper-wrapped presents stacked neatly on the kitchen table. Happily, my friends took pictures while he smiled at the little candles on his chocolate cake.

I had asked him earlier that day what flavor he liked and he had said vanilla with chocolate frosting. It had been an easy feat: Teenage Ninja Turtles were his favorite and it wasn't hard to find plastic placards to mount all around on the chocolate. Of course, he didn't know what to do with the plastic when the candles were blown out, he smiled, but wavered when I began removing them. In fact, he started to whine as was customary now that I had gotten into the habit of giving him everything his heart desired. I could afford it but I was beginning to wonder about the trend I had set. I was not a spoiled brat but I had always known guys and girls who grew up that way, and they all ended up the same.

I wasn't making that judgment every time but I had to admit to myself that I couldn't afford the confrontation. I'd set up a boundary with him and would think I had made progress. Nevertheless, he always worked on that boundary until I caved, and I found myself doing just that more and more. Now, more often, there was no fight in me. Let the kid have whatever it was that he had fixated on and feed that fix temporarily. Until the next one came along.

So that was my story, what I was coming into this meeting with, but I knew she knew none of it. So let her knit away. I was cordial at greeting her. She didn't know me well. I was her uncle, and my sister, her mother, was an ATM for her. I know I had given money here and there, but that's where the connection dropped. I only heard thing she said from her mother, nothing directly from her mouth, so this was a first for a long time. She was modest but I suspected that was a front. She was acting, as she no doubt did when people were strictly watching her. She shook my hand and smiled a working class smile, no teeth, wan, streching of the lips. She looked down at her son, and looked him up and down, doting on him. Maybe that was legitimate.

The stars came out at midnight,

a faded milk blot in the sky like a fist,

by then we were three-fourths to the way drunk,

gathered on the hill behind the school,

shivering, chattering like mad thieves,

about how we had scored, carrying our egoes,

waiting for the apocalypse, we might have been

talking about Jesus, like apostles huddled in a room,

hiding like outlaws.

"Anyone caught speaking Esperanto is thought crazy or headed for jail,

There'll be peace in the wilds of West Texas where the sun and the sky prevail."



It started off like a whimper, maybe not entirely for all involved but for the Son Volt/Tupelo purists, it was a head-scratcher. I never once expected Mr. Farrar to pull out a Tupelo classic but somewhere around the fifth or sixth song of the set, he plunged into "Grindstone," the lead track off the lesser known, March 15-22, 1992. My dates may be askew but the album remains intact in its obscurity. I say obscurity because it is seldom mentioned as being paramount to No Depression, Still Feel Gone or Anodyne. But the real story was that this show was a display of the landscape of his more recent frontiers, Okemah and The Search. So if you haven't been paying much attention, you felt a little out of sorts. But it was vintage Son Volt music, and that's ultimately what mattered on this particular night. Put down your ego, and let the oracle blow his breeze. Jay's not wisdomatic, no, I think he just writes about things he sees, and imagines from real life and the stuff which he might feel deserves homage. "Cocaine and Ashes" case in point.

But then you watch him stepping up to the microphone with his burnt brown acoustic and begin to moan out his lyrics like they were matter of fact. He doesn't smile, not once, mostly because he seems to always have to come back to himself to realize that there are other people in his vicinity. Then, there is an almost apologetic haste in moving on to the next song, the next time zone. Maybe we speak of these peculiarties too much, he's a musician, and all it takes is a few hours with him to know that he's a damn good musician.



I had forgotten just how spacey things could get with Son Volt music, how you couldn't really pen it into a country slot, or a rock slot or even an alt-country slot. None of that matters when they take the stage, because they seem to just play it how they feel it. Why I would even bother to critique their work has little to do now with my own preferential leanings toward Jay Farrar. I sometimes chuckle at his occasional (often occasional) lyrical pretensions, and his voice is a like a broken cuckoo clock behind unwound or an upright bass being unstrung. It's not that alone, though those conditions certainly do exist.



It was more a feeling that welled up in me, as I watched the bowl-cut headed maestro spinning his magic before a crowd of maybe 300-400, if that. This was a feeling of adoration on end, amazement on another, and a strange exception, which was pride. Pride because I was at last in the presence of an undeniable greatness. I'll never really fully understand his lyrics or creative process. But this adoration, pride at witness a true musician in his cups, comes from an insight that Mr. Farrar appears to be contributing to the library of folk tradition that continues to grow as the world of music turns. It seems inevitable that his songs will be sung by our children and our children will no doubt teach them to their children. Okemah & the melody of Riot, the name is ambitious, bold in its echoing connotations, but there it was right in front of us, as he slung guitars around his neck, strapped the harmonica shelf to his shoulders, and sang sometimes with the same intonations as Woody Guthrie. At least, with a sullenness the old horse would no doubt show appreciation for.

I've struggled at times with the strains of Guthrie, but it doesn't seem like Farrar ever has. I've always marvelled at his taste and ear for the beginnings of Americana music. And the aftermath thereof. I remember hearing an episode of the radio program, E-town where Son Volt performed several songs for the airwaves. Intermittently, the host, Nick Forester, asked Jay and some of the members of the band some leading questions regarding their understanding of the roots of the music which they played...it was all summed up when the band gathered together with Nick & Helen Forester and Josh Rouse, who was also featured that night and played Townes Van Zandt's "White Freight Liner Blues". It foolish to think, but I imgaine Mr. Farrar might have begun to think at a time like that that he had arrived. Any aspiring American rock star would have and should have.

Single Vision

by Stanley Kunitz

Before I am completely shriven

I shall reject my inch of heaven.

Cancel my eyes, and, standing, sink

Into my deepest self; there drink

Memory down. The banner of

My blood, unfurled, will not be love,

Only the pity and the pride

Of it, pinned to my open side.

When I have utterly refined

The composition of my mind,

Shaped language of my marrow till

Its forms are instant to my will,

Suffered the leaf of my heart to fall

Under the wind, and, stripping all

The tender blanket from my bone,

Rise like a skeleton in the sun,

I shall have risen to disown

The good mortality I won.

Drectly risen with the stain

Of life upon my crested brain,

Which I shall shake against my ghost

To frighten him, when I am lost.

Gladly as any poison, yield

My halved conscience, brightly peeled;

Infect him, since we live but once,

With the unused evil in my bones.

I'll shed the tear of souls, the true

Sweat, Blake's intellectual dew,

Before I am resigned to slip

A dusty finger on my lip.

Today I am grateful that:

I have the opportunity to help in a way that others can't.
I have the choice to say No or I can't do that.
I have the day off tomorrow, to more or less do as I wish.
I have a place to work, then I have another place to work.
My teacher application is 'pending review'.
I have the ability to change my mind and open myself to alternative ideas.
I have someone in life that hugs me and let's me hug her.
My car started today. A house? You have a place to live?
I want to pray. I want to see as many parts of myself that can be useful.
I have a family that loves me, I have friends who care.
My hands are warm most of the time. My hands show the evidence of the life I've lived.

Everyone seems to have their own spin on Obama. He is now the 44th President of the United States and in good health. Didn't need the bulletproof glass and so far as we've heard Trav Bickle didn't show up with sunglasses and a mohawk to the inauguration. High hopes. Everyone seems to have high hopes great expectations. I should be hopeful too. And am. I believe this is a great man we have in our midst. More than just a politician but a great man. So help him God. WE say again and again. So help him God. Tonight he gets to glitz and glam above all the bright lights that shine his way but a tenacious task ahead of him. He admits it. He points to the probabilities of all that lies ahead. Time to deliver on the promise of change.
I was sitting at my phone job desk, hooked into the system when he was swon in to office. I saw quite clearly as he repeated the oath word for word. I was chewing over my own uncertainties, my own shortcomings and there was a man who had stepped into a place of greatness, an inspiration to all Americans that anything is possible. Anything is possible. So it's no coincidence that as I sat on my couch in my apartment, getting tired and thinking about sleep, that instead of watching more nightly news and other crap, I thought of all the innovators, people of change, who instead of doing what they always do so easily, I got off the couch and came back to this laptop and decided to write a little... out of the need to write. The freedom that it brings the soul to just think about what's really going on right now. What's going on right now is quite good. Options are still open status. I'm working my second job tomorrow, an orientation, but for which I get paid. I remember it being pretty much a snow job but that's okay. It's my second job on top of the one that I have lined up for overtime. My girlfriend made me good soup for dinner and expected very little in return. Just to cuddle a little while before we went to bed. I still have this roof over my head and I got a number from a guy at my Tuesday night group. A guy that I gthink wants to keep his head straight like mine.
Shawn talked about anger in a way that made me almost cry it was so close to my own story. One of the things he talked about was putting pen on the paper and talking things out with a friend, weighing the pros and cons of his situation and the importance of just trying to be nice. Just trying to be pleasant. I almsot lost that chance once because I was too tied up in my head to know that you could just be quiet, serene at the dinner table. Nothing had to mean anything. It just was what it was. Dinner. Eating. Unwinding fom the day. And my day needed unwinding for some reason. About 2:30 I realized how tense I was. Haven't really equated anything with not smoking at all for three days. I've had one bad day of it in about nine days. I always make sure to set the clock to zero if I have more than a few. You have to. You have to be rigorously honest about that very thing. Shawn stopped for a while I think, and so far as I know keeps going. But the emotions keep going with you and before you know it you're either not getting what you think you deserve or losing something you already have and don't want to. Then, suddenly, it's an outrage. Someone has made a major mistake and they should pay for what they've done. But did anyone have to die over what was done or what happened? Usually not. Usually it's nothing more than a minor infraction.
What would Obama do? There's a guy who can get downright fiery without completely losing his cool. He's a wonder to watch because he can't swear. He has to be a powerful rhetorician without getting terribly emotional. He just knows when to lay down the gavel and when to palm it in his hand, like Morgan Freeman in Lean On me. Forget that I just compared him to Morgan Freeman. Anyway, I think there is an importance to putting stuff down on paper as much as possible. To get it out of the cranial echo chamber. The echo chamber. It is late. Sometimes tthe answer is sit. Lie still. Sleep on it-- save the rest of what;s lingering for another day.

Inventing Elliot
Football Genius by Tim Green
Maniac Magee by Jerry Spinelli
The Giver brings up a lot of topics
The Hiding Place by By Susan Beth Pfeffer

Drums, Girls, and Dangerous Pie by Sonnenblick
The Revealers by Doug Wilhelm

He smelled like an old car. American. A Mercury Grand Marquis.

Or perhaps a Plymouth Valiant. I have ridden in both in more

desparate times. I am ashamed to admit that this is true.

I sometimes wonder if it is the truth to this date.

But this is not about me. I need to my own truths by saying anything.

He smelled like an old American car, once owned by a smoker,

someone who drove often, long distances. The upholstery

ground out by strange passengers, self-doubt, complacency.

The windows would seem to have never been opened,

the anger, self-depracation, held in, the years alone scarring the interior.

I dedicate this to the one who made me leave

one morning because she needed her juice.

I must have needed her warmth that badly,

but walking back, I began hating her the most,

the only one I can remember. May she live as she decides, though she’ll leave trails

of lust and possibility if she decides.

OK, Mother, I’ll say it so they’ll know:I did not have to freeze that winter.

Sickness did not have to enter those rooms.

-From "freezing" , Langan

Before you begin again, remember your last words to me
How light they were, spoken in weakness,
how they played the odds, how they always played the odds,
John said, the word was in the beginning, take it or leave it.
Off and on, for the rest of eternity. Pass the buck, though
we may like to do so, the word is still there, patient,
but immovable, even more so than an obelisk, statues,
thunderclouds, a seated devotee.
The last words spoken before the thunder,
which merely clapped like the judgement of reception
into heaven or hell, the champagne light or the wine, wicked.
I knew what was said, in that time, I wasn't dumb or deaf,
but the proof was stacked against me, you.
X would not be defined any other way than how the calculists
have always determined that X could be defined.
No regrets, no regrets, just a hope to be good again.

My friend offered me wisdom about discipline
But I only half-heard
the way people---like me---do,
when we are distracted from the focus,
we are interested in so many other things aside
from the threat of the focus.

The color of our oxfords, the speed of our cars,
the weather, the financial report, robbery,
forging documents, the dog's hair, adultery,
picnics, lightning.




Discipline was the key to reopened doors , he said,
discipline was a portal to the cold glass of hope,
discipline was keeping the spine stacked one bone
upon the next corresponding bone.
discipline was steadying muscle, nerve & breath:
it is not parading with fire,
it is making a narrow entrance, unnanounced salvation.

For discipline to work, all that is necessary is:
assume the position. Fold hands.
Smile inwardly and wait for the image of something
to enter your heart and smile back.
There should be no gala, only contained celebration.

A quite conversation in the alley behind the building.
Because sometimes, upon further inspection,
disciplined work does not pass the eye of the judges.


Where does self-punishment fall within the gambit?
Other than consequences for poor choices,
waking up in the rain, underneath a capsized tent,
or the one thousand mornings I had to look at
myself over in the mirror, and wonder who looked back
Or is it more: shouting at the seagulls again,
their irreverence at our gravity, our being land-locked.

The questions come, they warm, they soothe, they adhere.

But they also bond to the many spirits which gather:

such as wormwood, Aziel, the bunch whom Milton met,

Mammon, Baal, hanging around the door waiting for your exit.