Overhead, without any fuss, the stars were going out.

�� Arthur C. Clarke, "The Nine Billion Names of God" ��






My chapbook, The Language of Exile, is available from Main Street Rag. I like to trade chapbooks. I want yours. I want it now ....

ME ME ME
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2006-03-31, 6:22 p.m.:
Two sweet-pudding-faced 12-year-old boys in the No. Boulder Park playing soccer and pretending to be Satanists, muttering "satanic curses" (or "verses"?) under their breath as they passed Baby Ro and me by (ensconced on blanket), then glancing furtively under long-lashed lids to see if they'd gotten a rise out of me. Cracking me up. Wish't I'd worn my upside-down-cross "This Way Up" t-shirt or my "Plan 9 from Outer Space" or my "Route 666" or my �Dawn of the Dead" (the ORIGINAL) or my "Vincent Price in Memoriam" or my "Pentagram-a-gram" (don't ask). Or even just the all-black on which the big word Vampyr is emblazoned in blood-red Gothic script.

2. Looking at houses, we drove down Sunshine Canyon via Gold Hill. My first time. Blue sky, cloud bursts. This drive is a life-changing experience, no joke. The meadows, the rock outcroppings, the thickets of firs climbing climbing inclines, falling falling no just catching themselves on the shoulderless drops on one side of the road (itself just about wide enough for one pickup to pass down � one hopes to meet no comers here). The snowcaps in all their blue-white-blue glory, the whole thing glorious - even the long stretches of dirt-and-pothole-only road. The geodesic domes that people call home. The off-the-gridders. The "Truth and Consciousness" ashram. The tiny dark cabins in the "center" of Gold Hill (population 100 or so?). I love these cabins. For some reason the idea of living in one cracks me up (would make me a crack-up? what's with the punning-riffing thing today?). Pedro lived in one when he first moved to Gold Hill. About as capacious as a closet, they are.

Anyway, during the drive, after the drive, after the Sunshine Canyon experience wholesale, I was All Mountain. It was all mountain for me. I would have no towns. This is the reason to be here, I was thinking. The reason to be in Colorado at all.

THEN. The perfect Boulder late-winter day. 65 or 70 degrees. The world out and about. Latte drinkers walking. Dog walkers talking. Babies in sweet new strappy sunhats. Toddler joy runs. Sidewalk cafe action. Bikers, hikers, climbers, stragglers, even people who don't belong, like me - belonged. Boulder can be THAT beautiful. The center of good things. City built on a crystal where the good can come and congregate and stay. Opposite of the Hellmouth, right? And I was All Boulder (I, fickle); I was thinking: This is the place to be, live, go out, grow, stay in and write.

We're all over the place. I am. All I know is, we spent 2 1/2 hours at the park and that was good.

3. Since my book came out, I can't really write. I feel a bit mired in the past, the good and the bad of it both (first I wrote "the food of it," which said food (of the past) would certainly be v. v. smelly at present). I also feel a bit sheepish vis-a-vis (this old hag of a topic once again) my smallish brain and smaller gifts. I am afraid of the work right now. I am afraid of my bad poetry. I was reading Carolyn Forche and Lorna Dee and old things I've loved, loved, even that damned Shkspr, and the blogs got me down. I couldn't read blogs and I could not bear to look at my own stuff, my recent outpouring of mewlings from the midwinter, all this broken stuff in need of repair, of TLC. It's a little like that feeling of being pregnant but wanting it to stop - this is usually in the panicked big stages near the end, when the prospect of labor is suddenly more real than holding an ice cube in your hand for one minute - that analogy probably makes no sense to anyone, but what ho - it's that �stop the world, I want to get off� thing, too, I guess - but mostly it's thinking: NO NO NO, no way am I giving birth to this baby! No way is this baby coming out. But the baby always does. Come out, one way or another.

4. Yes, it's true. I ordered a double latte with an EXTRA shot, three shots total. I slurped it through my straw all the way up the canyon THEN I opened myself a nice cold Assam tea. It was 4:30PM then.

5. Addicted to Assam right now, utterly hung up on the stuff. We're moving. We're moving to town. And how will I be writing and editing again, and whenever will I see Lorna Dee, when? And � everything else. The magazine cover prominently displayed in front of the hall toilet, �Attack of the Killer Line Arrays!� (modeled on big bodacious giantess of high-heeled �50s movie fame).

6. I�m going to North Carolina. No one can stop me. And I am going to kick some ass in Star Wars Trivial Pursuit. And I�m going to read Gravity�s Rainbow and White Noise, eventually. Thank you for your attention.

2 comments

2006-03-20, 11:05 a.m.:
Today at my house (8,500 feet - Is is raining in Boulder?):


1 comments

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