Frost Fix

Now close the windows and hush all the fields:
If the trees must, let them silently toss;
No bird is singing now, and if there is,
Be it my loss.

Robert Frost, "Now Close the Windows".

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Practice and Play

I admire musicians who practice by themselves for hours. I have not been one since my early teens, when I sat in practice rooms and willed myself past classical and show tunes and into boogie-woogie.

Not today, not even when I'm playing a great instrument and playing it well. The only way I can stick with it for hours is in a group - and then I do so happily. The size of the group doesn't really matter - some of the best times were me and a drummer in dark room, just jamming. But it has to be more than one. When we're playing together (what a perfectly suitable multiple meaning, "play") it's great.

Then, when it cooks, it is as good as it gets.

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Golden Choice

Even for those of us who are consitutionally adverse to positions on the American left, Obama is an impressive guy. His opponents seem to be lining up around the idea that he is not as smart as he seems. I think this is a mistake. I think he is smarter than Bill Clinton, for example, who is way smart. And obviously, as to principle and discipline, he's in a different and far better league. A league in which John McCain also plays.

So there is some kind of hope here on my street in St. Louis. I heard the other day a comment from a German commentator, translating an expression: we have a golden choice.

Absolutely there are huge policy differences. If only the sellers of media will allow those policy choices to matter, I think these candidates can elevate the discourse. The media - mainstream and other - will either be the lift under their wings or a weight on their backs.

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There is a huge difference between:

we've lost, let's pull the troops out, and

we've won, let's pull the troops out.

Isn't there?

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Hey why is this starting up five years later?

I have no idea.

Except that this is the answer to the question about writing for the drawer:

I don't.

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