People get ready

Day before departure frenzy. Mapquest is your friend, blessed be. Hope everyone's Christmas went well. Mine did.

Back this weekend with details, pictures, shallow stab wounds.

Shh

There's this other guy you've never heard of. He sometimes writes poems. One of them is over at Verse Daily today.

Penn

So I think finding a taxi in Philadelphia is, for me, pretty much a fool's errand. Shame on you, City of Transportation Infrastructure Inadequacy & Brotherly Love. Fie, even. Oh, yes, fie. I drop the fie on Philly.

But it looks like I can take a train out, leaving me with an 11 minute walk to my hotel. I don't mean to throw out still more technical jargon but professionals often say, this is going to bite.

This is to say nothing of hoofing about from interview to interview.

Yep, it's gonna bite. Teethmarks, my friends.

This would be awesome

Philadelphia International's Ground Transportation Desk suggested this. Which would be really awesome. The bad kind of awesome.

Years later people would point to that moment as the beginning of the end.

Fantastic

So I'm planning for Philadelphia next week and one of the things that has so far eluded my clever little brain is finding accessible taxis in Philly. Apparently, there aren't any:

"It should be noted that some very large cities, Philadelphia (1,600 cabs including 160 new medallions), Dallas (1,900) cabs, Detroit, (1,320 cabs), and Seattle (850 cabs) do not appear to have accessible taxicabs in service. In fact, Seattle just re-wrote its taxi ordinances, and stated that accessible cabs were not an issue at this time, although it was an issue that they might re-visit at a later date. However, in New York City the Taxicab and Limousine Commission (TLC) is considering a rule to require that all 12,187 yellow medallion cabs be converted to accessible vehicles."

Lovely.

My heart just settled back to earth

God help me, it's Rocky Balboa today and I'll be there. I recall very vividly going to see Rocky IV on a Sunday night, which seemed scandalous somehow. That said, I don't have any particular fondness for the series. I'm not sure I've even seen all of the original. In the heat of basic cable delirium, they've all formed a kind of Stallone-consomme. And if that image terrifies you as much as me, let's have drinks.

***

Got my wizened little claws on Willie Nelson's new album, Songbird, produced by Ryan Adams. Like everything Adams does, some things work, some don't. There is a great, full sound behind Willie, though, and on the best, most natural takes, the songs shine.

***

The picture below this, the you can check into the Hotel VFW but you can never leave, the Santa still on the honeymoon phase with meth, is the man I'd hired to be my personal attendant in Carbondale after a powerfully squat, powerfully hairy little Romanian man, who loved ABBA and The Steve Miller Band, who had worked for me previously, tried to extort money from me. At some point, you will begin the calculus of desperation, reading this.

Oh, the stories. They burn. They burn. Bitter, Matt, bitter.

When you see this man

what do you think? 

Hap

Happy 22nd birthday to the two losers flanking my left and right. In the hospital waiting room, I was reading a Reader's Digest article on Tasmanian devils when the news came back. I remember it like yesterday.

However, I'd like to forget the actual, real live outhouse behind us that my dad scared up somewhere while hunting antiques.

Yes, I'd like to forget that.

I won't stop holding on

I need new shoes. Size 11. Dressy, yet not stuffy. Casual but refined. Insert ad copy here.

***

Today's under-appreciated Bobby Womack song is "More Than I Can Stand."

***

Filed under OMGWTF, the season two finale of Battlestar Galactica: wow. One of the best ever. Mind effectively blown.

***

Points to Ian Harris for getting Evel Knievel into a poem. I'm a touch jealous of that. I should have written him into a poem by now. Really inexcusable that I haven't. But I do have Stretch Armstrong in a poem, which is related in my memory of my childhood only by a kind of simultaneity.

***

Reread: A Defense of Poetry.

***

How bad does Eragon look? Really bad? Terrible? Atrocious? Check.

***

69. Sunny. Yes.

Tight

Today's moderately non-sexy Conway Twitty album cover is from 1981's Number Ones. Note the inviolate dome of hair, the sultry gaze burning through the haze of post-disco sleaze, the theoretically provocative necklace resting in the sparse thatch of chest hair, the bling before bling was bling of the gold watch and the ring, the sensitive stylings of the wine-hued sweater, its sleeves rolled comfortably up and the arms crossed like a man who knows what heartache is but longs to someday love again.

The man on the radio won't leave me alone

Just finished a three or four episode run of Battlestar Galactica that was just amazingly great: the Pegasus/Resurrection ship storyline. I'd seen them before, when I still tried to follow it via TiVo, but it's here that I got sidetrack, gave up. It's telling that an arc in the middle of a season is better by miles than the finales of most dramas.

***

Plane tickets purchased. Ready to go. Mostly. I haven't been to Philadelphia since I was 18.

***

What's for lunch?

The sudden

Travel plans for Philadelphia finalized: I'll be there from the 27th through the 30th, Wednesday through Saturday. I'm not sure exactly where I'll be staying just yet, though. That's a little sketchy, which is troublesome, but we'll figure it out. Looking forward to seeing Eliot again and anyone else I might happen upon.

Street

It looks as though I'm heading to MLA in Philadelphia. Which is good news, but crazy. Traveling during the holidays. Eep. And so I'm a bit nervous.

When the Lord

LOVE POEM ON A MONDAY MORNING WITH MOCK COMPLAINTS, UNREASONABLE WISHES, YOUR NAME AND THE EARTH FOR GOOD MEASURE

Darling, it’s this binary morning futzing all

I’m trying to say. Clouds glide away.

The sun is pantomime. I can’t understand

an atom of creation. I can’t raise

the garage door with my mind,

the better to escape today’s apocalypse,

the better to fade through all

America. I’m thinking of molten asphalt

and the rorid grass running beside

the roads like deer. I’m thinking of Las Vegas
because I’m thirsty, because

everything there is not free

at all and that’s the precise spot

on the map we should marry

all our troubles. I’ll complain of my bones,

I think it’s safe to say

and I’ll worry the miles

we never drive. I’ll say your name

when I shouldn’t

to every door barred before us

as if you’re known in Belize to be the password

to tumble the last lock

and loose the last bolt.

Jennifer, look at the sky peeping down

like an adjective for angels

I really don’t want to use

so I won’t. No one will promise me wings.

There is a simplicity

in such a request

I think you should love

but you don’t.

To bravely want the sky is

to bravely want the sky

despite all the forecasts of rain and sleet

and, oh, yes, gravity,

to which we keep speaking

like vaguely lost travelers,

we are just passing through, we are just passing through.

I made my baby say goodbye

Notes spent the night in Earth City, Missouri. I like that name, I'm tucking away that for a poem.

***

I've been watching Battlestar Galactica again, from the beginning, to refresh myself for the dvd set of the second half of the second season. What a great, great show. I rewatched the mini-series this weekend for the first time in a while and while there are some obvious signs it's a pilot, in essence, for the ensuing series, in that certain characters aren't quite defined yet, I got a real charge from it: it has far more sci-fi in it than I remembered, more spectacle, which was cool to see when compared to the usual fare of politics and paranoia. It seems Baltar has been softened somewhat, at least as far as I've seen in the second season, from his portrayal in the mini-series as almost too despicable. That was interesting. Edward James Olmos continues to be an amazing coup in casting; that face barely needs a screenplay to convey meaning.

At any rate, if you haven't seen it, you should check it out.

***

I had reason to compare temperatures between here and another place this weekend: that other, unnamed place was sixty five degrees colder. Yikes.

***

I saw Sarah McLachlan on Good Morning America performing John Lennon's "Happy Xmas (War Is Over)" with a choir of children, and while it's an almost too obvious choice, I'll be damned if the chorus didn't sneak up on and steamroll me: "if you want it" is devastating.