YOU CAN SEE SO MUCH FARTHER THAN ME

…I've been listening to Lucinda Williams. I like her album, "Car Wheels on a Gravel Road" best. Lucinda actually sounds like she eats a bowl or two of gravel for breakfast each morning. Or like someone's taken a blow torch to her throat. And she looks like she's been knocked around a bit, or maybe she got pretty loaded on gin and ran into some furniture. Maybe more than once.
However, Lucinda is also a little sexy in that rough, honkytonk GILF sort of way few older women can pull off.
But really, I like how honest her lyrics are.
I'm a big fan.

...I think what the world does not need is Donald Trump as America's president. And America certainly does not need Donald Trump's reality show, which is harder to watch than "Grease 2." Just having to look at The Donald for more than a few seconds is akin to waterboarding.

…What the world does need is more places like "Powell's Books" in Portland, Oregon. That store takes me out at the knees. While there this last time, I kept thinking I was Jennifer Aniston in "Bruce Almighty" where Bruce, as God, gives her these uber intense orgasms by using his mind alone, and Jennifer (“Grace”) has a series of chaotic body spams and shudders, knocking over shelves and splaying herself on the counter in the process.
That's what Powell's does to me. It makes me climax.
Yep, the world needs more bookstores.

…Yesterday I spent a good part of the morning going through the many, many stacks of printed pages I have resting (albeit) neatly on my floor. It looks a little bit like the newsroom scene from "All the President's Men," sans Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford.
I have so much writing. OH-M-G.
What I do is, when I get up from my desk, I push Print. (I once--years and years ago when "word processors" were first available-- somehow erased 100 single-spaced pages of a novel. I almost threw up all over myself. So, I've been paranoid ever since.) The story or poem that comes out might be a polished thing that I've already sent somewhere or it could be a snippet of something where I like the first sentence, the sound of a certain word, the essential premise of the piece. Consequently, that's a lot of printing being done.
I haven't gone through those stacks of paper in a long time. Like, maybe a year. (That's an embarrassing confession, akin to admitting you haven't changed your underwear in a week. Or that you still wet the bed. Suck your thumb. Have a crush on Marsha Brady.)
At one point during the morning, I expected to look down and find my feet covered in oily black ink. Aside from the two novels, in the last two years I have written 700 stories/poems equating to 254,000 words. (Yep, I keep track.)
That's a lot of letters and commas. A lot of periods and vowels.
I have a lot of poetry. Oodles. Who's to know if it's any good?
I found quite a few touching pieces I wrote to you. One talked about how we first met. Many were heart-scorching and tragic. A couple made me chuckle. You are a good person. I hope someone has told you that lately and that when they did, you believed them.

…I pulled out a novel I started last year and did not finish. I was 167 pages into the thing when I quit it. That's a long gestation. I expected the writing to be awful, but you know what? It wasn't at all. The first many pages actually flew. I’m taking another shot at it. This is one of the two novels I've vowed to complete by year-end 2011, so I'd better get off my skinny ass and start writing.

…These are the things I like on a Wednesday:

"Writing books is the closest men ever come to childbearing." Nancy Ravanelli

"Dying gets everyone feeling alive." Rachel Glaser

"I haven't seen you in the daylight in a long time." from "Welcome to the Rileys."

"Ummm, Juicy Fruit." Chief in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest