The Blog Sabbatical, i promise like a Christmas; instead of presents i will gift myself with absence. The same letdown. I return to it after half a day, chastened. It's my alibi for when i leave out something important (i'll have time then to really say it right) & (alas) for all the quillets, also.

01 25 04

   "Five Foo Fighters"

You weren't allowed to sit down
'cause that meant you were goofing off,
and nobody goofs off on the job
for very long.

Most of my energy went into fighting gravity.
After lunch i was like a sapling on a hillside
threatened with winds, slippage, rain runoff.
I swayed but i stood.

The radio played seven songs over and over:
i got to know them quite well.
I learned to blank out the lyrics
and add my own words.

When i went home i tried to remember
the songs i'd written that day.
It was like looking for firewood
in a snowstorm.

Today i heard one of those songs,
and felt the meaning i'd carved on its bark
those intolerable days, if not the exact phrases:
MINIMUM WAGE.

(1981)

Travelling is my only drunkenness.

How to be an elitist without snobbery: whatever your specialty, call it a birth defect.

Dilemma of the modern artist--invent a new language to tell the truth and no one can understand it. The next dilemma--everyone speaks a different language and starts to collect into sub-sub-subcultures. And ours--people have forgotten what language is for.

This is the late twentieth century so i believe in magic and i believe in chemicals and most of my insights will fall between the two because both half-truth languages are too small for them and my metaphors walk on air or they don't go anywhere and what else is new?

"I was shipwrecked before I got aboard." --Sterling Hatden

Very likely the best minds of my generation are in prison. That would account for a lot of things...