2006, y'all

I never make New Year's Resolutions but for those of you that do, what are they for the coming year?

Hockey puck

While doing some work tonight, I'm listening to an old Don Rickles' stand-up album, from 1968, and, Jesus, it's almost surreal, the speed and scatalogical venom spewing all over. It's all an act, of course, and hysterical. Misanthropy!

50k

I just noticed the hit meter for this blog topping 50,000. That's crazy. Thanks to all you readers who stop shopping on Amazon, searching for recipes, or downloading porn, for dropping by here over the last year or so. Next year? Maybe I'll actually be interesting. ;)

These dreams

I really should not confess the latest of my weird dreams but this one amuses me too much. It will ruin all my street cred, but oh well. Never say I did not give my all for you, readers.

I was dreaming some scene from Star Wars, only not really: it was imagined Star Wars, not an actual scene, but it felt like something out of Return of the Jedi, with Luke and Vader dueling with their light sabers.

Only in this dream, there came a departure: a third light saber wielding individual was involved. Who was it?

Fozzy the Bear. From the Muppets. Um, yeah, so I'm a loser. It's ok, really, I can live with that.

I write poems and have dreams about Jedi-powered hand puppets.

The ladies are lining up.

A dreamworld of magic

My Christmas gift to you.

The final front

Last night I dreamed John Ashbery appeared in my bedroom in the middle of the night, almost as if he'd beamed down, a la Star Trek. He was very polite, but I think he was an alien. He kept holding things up and asking what they were. What is this, he'd say. Over and over.

Weird.

***

Merry Christmas and happy holidays to everyone. Many of you I miss and wish were here.

Let's get it on

A NOTE TO FUTURE LOVERS

Nevermind the salt of faith it takes

to imagine you are out there,

patient and vague, unaware even

we might one day be seized

by that almost sudden nakedness

of which Marvin Gaye sang.

Perhaps in the vestibule of time

you’re clutching the pamphlet

that is the story of your life,

stunned by the page upon which

my name swims up out

of the dense murk of text

like some cyclopean bane of sailors

with a mind to swamp

and sink. Maybe that will be me

and you will demand

that I explain myself,

how I came to be there

in that specific slant of the singular sun

on a day no more precise

than the millions preceding it,

and whatever else I say

know that I am just as surprised as you.

Santa wants to know

Have you been good this year?

St. Lawrence Book Award Winner

Here

Can't you feel that full moon

My bizarre experiment in unchecked hair growth continues. Which sounds appalling, now that I write it. But I mean I haven't been able to get a haircut yet. Tomorrow, though, at long last. It's driving me batty. I wonder how girls stand the strands. Or the guys in Def Leppard. Finally, I learn empathy for those guys. Now I might be admitted into heaven.

***

Last month, I guess it was, I recorded several poems for From the Fishouse. Matt O'Donnell, up there in wintry Maine, is running a great project. I was sent in the mail an eensy mp3 recorder about the size of a cigarette lighter, a little larger. Easy to work, at least for most people -- it was a bit challenging for me, to push the button with my mouthstick, then stow it, then start reading. So if the recordings suffer, blame my spinal cord. Saying that amuses me. Ha!

The poems should be posted next month or thereabouts. The ones I recordered were:

Questions for Godzilla
On Being Asked Who the You Is in My Poems
Elba
Minus
Lullaby
The Numbers are Not In
The Amplified World

***

Going back to disability for a moment, I should say that terms like physically challenged or differently abled or, God help me, handicapable, make me insane. I caught a new variation yesterday: diffabled.

Yes, I'm diffabled. Besides an apparent speech impediment, I'm also differently abled. It's like in that episode of Wonder Woman I remember from when I was a kid. The villain was, essentially, a brain floating in a fish tank, more or less. Freed of the pesky flesh, it had telekinetic powers. The climactic showdown took place in a gym. Why the brain needed to be at the gym was never really touched upon, but it started tossing barbells at Wonder Woman.

This, of course, was silly.

The great thing about the disembodied floating brain is that there really is a comic book villian fitting that description. It's name? The Brain. It hangs out with a talking gorilla named Monsier Mallah. You have no idea how happy this makes me.

***

Back to The Godfather Part II.

Bring it on home to me

For a while now, something was off between my cable modem and iTunes. Every other program, Firefox, Outlook, etc., worked fine, was speedy, but any download attempted on iTunes was just interminable. So I haven't purchased any music in a while. But I've finally managed to fix that problem. So recommend me some good music from this year, would you, gentle Readers?

Auto

We all do it. We might not admit to it in polite company. But we do.

What am I talking about? No, you pervs, not that. I'm talking about googling ourselves.

When I was first beginning to publish, I did it a lot. I hardly ever do it now. Before tonight, it had been months. Since the spring, I guess.

I found a link to a poem of mine, "Ptolemaic Sunset," that appeared in New Orleans Review. It's also forthcoming in my new book.

For your reading pleasure, here 'tis.

The Lion, The Witch, and The White Trash

Wow, that's a wildly inappropriate beginning, but I'll run with it. Friday I took my cousins Ryan and Molly to see the latest in Hollywood's burgeoning stable of intolerably long titled franchises, The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe. The three of us had the theater to ourselves at first, but after the previews began a large family stumbled in, complete with already howling toddler, restless brother and sister, grandmother and obviously senile great grandmother. I appreciate the impulse for a family outing, of course. I was there with the kids myself. But there are also these concepts commonly known as bad ideas. And we were witnessing one.

The little girl was very clear about not wanting to be there, crying the whole time. Grandma was constantly getting up with her, pacing around the theater, trying to calm her, but not actually leaving for the lobby as would have been polite. To his credit, her brother was totally into what was going on on the big screen. He talked constantly, asking questions, but did so fairly quietly. I appreciate enthusiasm. Meanwhile, great grandma keeps randomly deciding the movie is over, trying to stand up, leave, before someone tells her to sit down, it's not over yet. Little sis is still sobbing.

Agh.

I thought the movie was pretty generic for the most part, though the kids loved it. It proves the rule that bad guys are almost always way cooler, and in this case, literally. Tilda Swinton as the ice queen was pretty great, as was her ice castle. But the rest was fairly bland. I've never read the books, so I'm not sure how it fares as an adaptation. As for the Christian allegory, it's there but only in the sense that it uses the Jesus-type as a narrative. It'd be easy for the average viewer to miss it. During the movie, it got me to thinking about how much stronger a Jesus-narrative a movie like E.T. is. Which I'd never really thought about before, though I'm sure I'm late to that idea.

***

Is Christmas really this week? Wow. I did all my shopping last week, thankfully, online.

***

Rejection from The Canary, a journal I really like. Curses, foiled again.

And must get down to serious thinking about revisions, last ones, for Notes. It can always be improved, made better, sharper, leaner. February isn't far off.

***

Listening to, right this instant: "Back Up Train" by Al Green. Next: "More Than I Can Stand" by Bobby Womack.

Dare to be

Boring. I'm so boring lately. Apologies for that, everybody. It's this cold and all this darkness. I don't get depressed during winter, like those who have seasonal affective disorder, but I sure dislike it all. Let's move to San Diego. Or Honolulu. Or wherever December does not hold sway.

***

Peter Jackson's King Kong is pretty awesome. For most of its three hours, it never feels long, though towards the end I was momentarily aware, during a pause, that ten minutes trimmed might be a good thing. Still, it's all kinds of entertaining.

***

Today, James Bo Guest and Clay Welles Guest turn 21. My identical twin brothers. It's impossible to believe they're that old, that they aren't still 5 years old and obsessed with lawnmowers. I remember the morning they were born clearly. I sat in the waiting room, reading magazines, an article in Reader's Digest on Tasmanian Devils.

Happy birthday, you knuckleheads.

Today

King Kong, if I can stand walking in the cold. I mean to.

I saw the original last week for the first time. The first twenty minutes or so are from a movie no one would ever bother to remember. But the last hour, paced no differently than a modern action blockbuster, achieves a weird, fever-like, almost hallucinogenic quality. I was completely absorbed by it.

Interesting to see what Peter Jackson needs three hours to do what the original manages in ninety minutes.

***

Glad the books are arriving for everyone. Again, sorry for the delay.

Chosen

So there is no more Buffy, at least for me. I finished the last two episodes yesterday evening, after waiting a couple of days, stringing them out. The seventh season seems somewhat maligned, though I'm not quite sure why. It certainly isn't as focused as, say, seasons five and six, giving off the vibe of a victory lap almost, even while ratcheting up the stakes, at least according to the scripts. And there are some moments of questionable characterization nearing the end, which almost never happened before. But, I found the first half of the season exceedingly tightly plotted, a great little action movie leading up to the defeat of the first ubervamp. Spike's story, to me, was really moving, though some might miss the bad, bad boy he once was. Much fun with Andrew. Just devastated by the death of one particular character and another's reaction to it. Great to see Angel and Faith. And the Mayor! Probably still my favorite villain. It ended right, with the original gang still side by side. I could go on. But I won't. It took me well over a year; it's hard to believe how attached one can become to fictions. Then again, it isn't.

***

I need a haircut. I look like one of the Ramones. The non-dead ones, I mean.

***

I love Kenneth Koch's poem "Permanently."

***


Tell me about your fake memories of me. ;)

Offer

I've never seen The Godfather. I know, I know. In a world filled with movies like this, you miss some. But, tonight, I'm correcting that oversight. Thank you, Netflix.

What classic movie have you never seen but feel like you should?

Post

A.D. brings up a good question, which I meant to mention today. To everyone that ordered books, you haven't received them yet because my brother has been tooling around with them in the backseat of his car. I'd asked him to drop them off at the post office, but he, "uh, forgot."

Sorry about that, everybody. They'll go out directly.

In the still of the night

Raining all weekend. Writing and movies for me, tucked away in the dry, in the warm. Winter is like this: I hardly go out unless I have to. And what is there I have to get out for? Not much, these days. Still, a pleasant weekend. Finally: I vanquished the evil eBay seller and as I expected they weren't crooked, just swamped. Apparently a glitch in their shipping info sent several dozen packages to wrong addresses all over the country. One woman in Colorado Springs received 17 of the boxsets I'd ordered. She wanted just one. Oops. Still, that doesn't excuse their not answering emails, giving me conflicting info on the phone, and just plain annoying me. I returned the favor, making enough of a nuisance of myself that a very nice girl finally gave me the lowdown, telling me they'd re-routed the package and it did in fact arrive on Friday. And it's so cool, compact and snazzy, taking up perhaps the space of two seasons. So all's well on that front.


***

I've been writing, or working on, letters of recommendation for friends. Which is nice, in a way. Even though there's a kind of generic nature to these, a certain form to follow, it's not rote work when you're talking about people you care for, whose work you admire.

I appreciate everyone who's ever helped me. I want to do the same for others. It's a pleasure and a privilege.

***

I wrote a poem this weekend. A private poem, not for public consumption. Private.