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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I wonder how eloquent others may be when they are genuinely writing for the drawer, to a locked diary. Here, we're either on non-personal stuff or making the personal stuff so ambiguous. or so opaque, that it can't get us into trouble. But these are arbitrary additions, adulterations - they interfere with the process - pure writing must be for oneself alone. Unless we are willing to be as naked in real life as we find ourselves in dreams.

You would think that beneath the surface of any poker game there is naked testosterone, the desire to crush the other players, but I don't see it. In fact I see a bunch of guys sitting around enjoying the challenge of the game and each other's company. It is, in a word, civilized.

More so, I suppose, because it's low-stakes. Last night was my best ever, winning 29 bucks. The money is about equal to my worst, and many nights I just about break even. Cheap dates, we are. Of course because we're in the middle of hunting season we consume a lot of venison, not cheap on the market but free, sort of, to the guy who shot it.

Out in the shed where the deer are slaughtered, it's Lord of the Flies Lite, with deer heads, and even the old grizzlies with plenty of points look scared after life on the run. There is an element of civilization here, with the rationale for killing so well-developed and so far from the original rationale: survival of the hunter. We are way past survival. Now it's wildlife management.