--RIGHT NOW SOMEONE IS FALLING IN LOVE WITH YOUR SMILE

…Happy Memorial Day Weekend. I hope it's been a good one for you. Me, I came back from NY, had a day at home, and then took off for four days to Walla Walla wine country five hours from where I live.
I feel swollen. I also feel like I've been trampled by a herd of rhinos, beat up by a ring of angry mountain goats. But I had a lot of fun.
Wine-making is pretty fascinating. It's science and math and art all bottled up. There's a certain alchemy to the craft. There's a definitive beauty in all the smoky, oaky layers of those sophisticated wines.
I hope you had the chance to relax this weekend and have a glass of wine or two.

…I have a story, "Cousins" up at Flash Fiction Offensive and couple of new poems --"The Wall" and "For Those" up at a special Memorial Day issue of The Rusty Truck.
Memorial Day is very important to me. All of my brothers went in the army. One of them served in Vietnam and did not have a good experience there, to say the least. The poems I wrote for Rusty Truck were for him.
It's hard to imagine being in wide open combat. It's hard to imagine your friends dying next to you, bullets and rockets shrieking overhead. It's hard to imagine.

…Whatever you do today or this week, don't go see "The Hangover 2." You will be disappointed. You might even get angry, angry that the writers could be so lazy and take a big money grab by writing the exact same script without the charm of the earlier film.

…I had a dream last night. It was not a good one. I won't tell you what it was about.
It was one of those dreams that seemed very real. I woke in the middle of the night and was relieved to discover that the dream never happened, yet each time I fell back asleep I re-entered the dream/nightmare.
Does that ever happen to you?

…This is a thing I know: it's easy to let go. Let yourself go and gorge yourself. Let go. Stop caring, grooming. Let go. Stop holding onto things you once deemed precious and valuable. Let go. Make a change. Draw a line. Let go. Tell yourself this thing is not as important as you once thought. Let go. Watch the balloon squiggle into the sky, becoming a smear and then nothing. It's easy to let go.
It's hard to hold on, to stick with things, to keep caring. But I think that's what separates the fleeting from those that endure.

…I like these things for the end of May:

"Make the leap and the net will appear." Zen saying

"The mind is a wonderful thing--it starts working the minute you're born and never stops until you get up to speak in public." Roscoe Drummond

"The great man is he who does not lose his child's heart." Mencius (371-291 B.C.)

"Do not be too timid and squeamish about your actions. All life is an experiment." Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The well placed period can be like a spike to the heart." Samuel Taylor Coleridge

"A poem is a machine made of words." William Carlos Williams."

"The purpose of art is to stop time." Bob Dylan

"Writing is happy work. As gratifying as sex or hard laughter or love or good drugs." Anne Lamott