--EVERY SECOND IS AN ETERNITY

 

…Tomorrow, before the sun even shows her face, I’ll be headed to the airport en route to see one of my best friends in Wisconsin, returning late Friday, so this will be the last post until Saturday.

…The weather sure has been a moody customer lately.  Dark and brooding, then bright and perky for an hour, then clouds shimmy over the sun and it feels like the movie is over though the credits haven’t ran yet.

It’s been so windy I don’t how the trees stay standing.  A couple weeks back, one broke its muscled arm and the branch landed on the roof of my garage where the branch remains stuck to his day.  I tried to pull it out, but the limb is six sizes bigger than both my biceps, which I know isn’t saying much.
Before that, tubs and tubs and tubs of rain fell.  Every kind of rain.  Sideways rain, rain when the sun still shone, thick rain the size of dimes, sleet, hail, stupid spitting rain, rain like syringes, rain like cookie sheets…  I always wonder what the deer do when it’s pouring and sub 40 degrees.  That has to be miserable.  Where do they go, what do they do to stay warm?  Poor deer.  Come to my house and dry off.  I have extra rooms where you can lie down and nap a while.

…New stuff came in the mail. 

  Music:
Kendrick Lamar
Aimee Mann
Miranda Lambert
Thomas Rhett
  Books:
Charles Bukowski
Dominique Christina
Robert McKee
Derek Miller
Malcolm Mackay
Robert Olen Butler

…I’m going to need a half dozen trips around the world to finish all the books I’m surrounded by.  But other than love, books are the next best thing have surrounding you.  Well, maybe kids are second.  Yes, definitely.

…For the panel I’m going to be on next year at AWP, I had to fill out some forms way in advance.  They asked rudimentary questions but when it came to gender, oh boy.  I must be really out of touch because I had never heard of half of them.  Here were the choices (really):

Male
Female
Agender
Bigender
Cisgender
Gender Fluid
Genderqueer
Intersex
Transsexual
Transgenta
Two-Spirit
A gender not identified here

…Here’s hoping you have a fantastic week.  I’ll leave you with a few things I found in the last few days that make me think:

-“Ubuntu” –“I am because of you,” in Swahili

-The life that I could still live, I should

live, and the thoughts that I could still
think, I should think.
    -C.G. Jung

-“Anything worth thinking about is worth singing about.” Bob Dylan

-“I will tell you, that ant is very alive.  Look at how he fusses with being stepped on.” Mary Oliver

-“Why does no one take you aside and tell you what’s coming?” David Foster Wallace

-“I realized that everything I knew of Sam, and he of me, was still inside us.”  Patti Smith, on Sam Shepard

-"To love is to suffer. To avoid suffering one must not love. But then one suffers from not loving. Therefore, to love is to suffer; not to love is to suffer; to suffer is to suffer. To be happy is to love. To be happy, then, is to suffer, but suffering makes one unhappy. Therefore, to be happy one must love or love to suffer or suffer from too much happiness.”  Woody Allen

-“I need to concentrate on each sound so that every blade of grass is as important as the flower.”  Arvo Part, composer