--GO AHEAD: TELL ME AGAIN HOW MUCH YOU CARE.

…I have a new micro, "Jemima" up at Eunoia Review and a poem, "Wind Pipe" at The Camel Saloon. Both are also here under "Words in Print."

…This morning the sun wore a monocle, shrouded in the gray gauze of cloud cover. For a moment, I thought a giant Cyclops was staring at me from behind the heavens. But, no, it was just the sun.
The sun has seen so much over the years. What stories it could tell.

…I got a hot tub. It seats seven and is metallic silver, pretty cool-looking actually. It faces the lake so you can have a cocktail and watch the water skiers. Should be a fun time in winter.

…Yesterday I discovered the poetry of Kelli Anne Noftle. She's quite good. As is Martha Collins.
It's difficult for me to find poets I like. Most try too hard and so their writing becomes this "experimental" gibberish, pretty language that doesn't mean anything unless you've just dropped a few tabs of acid. Or else it's so basic as to seem trite.
Something with a narrative arc but strong word play is right up my alley.

…I buy a lot of magazines. If you subscribe, they're like, 70% off the newsstand price and thus, practically free. Magazines are definitely one of the best values out there.
What I do when I read magazines is I tear stuff out. Some of the tears are black and white profile shots that I pin on a cork board and keep in my office for inspiration. Others are those fragrance strips. I rip one open when I write and it gets all fragrant. My favorite colognes are clean with a hint of citrus. I love Aqua di Gio.

…Jason Jordan once did a post on his blog about the five most overrated writers and he got lambasted for it. It sort of disgusts me how politically correct we've become. Can't a person have an opinion? And on their own blog, for Pete's sake?

…I just saw in "The Writer's Chronicle" that AWP is coming to Seattle in 2014. That should be fun times at Ridgemont High.

…There are many professional skate boarders in Seattle this weekend. Hundreds and hundreds have flocked to The Emerald City. My son and his friends are going ape shit about this. Me, I'm going to a movie by myself after I drop them off at Key Arena.

…When I first started out, I only wrote rhyming poetry. Then, in high school, I got selected to attend a semi-elite Workshop in Port Townsend (Raymond Carver was there) and I realized that no one really rhymed anymore.
I had just turned seventeen.
This was one of the first things I wrote that weekend, about a girl I was crushing on at the time:

Woman

Beauty has never done as much,
nor the sea in all its wonder,
but you,
woman,
walking barefoot and free,
have.

…There are so many poets (can you tell I'm in a poetry mode?) out there. Bajillions of them. And none of them make any money. The only people who buy poetry are writers. But you gotta really admire that about poets--how they toil in obscurity just because they are so smitten with their craft.

…This is something I love that you should love as well because, well, it's about love and lovers:

"Writers are great lovers. They fall in love with other writers. That's how they learn to write. They take on a writer, read everything by him or her, read it over again until they understand how the writer moves, pauses, and sees. That's what being a lover is: stepping out of yourself, stepping into someone else's skin." Natalie Goldberg