Be bop

But if this is about writing, does it have to make sense?  The poet's dilemma.  We think it is the sound of the words - the sound in your head, the sound in your ears - and the way they fit against each other, or don't.  Not meaning.  The meaning comes from the sound and the fit, not the other way round.  With ancient Chinese writing there was no punctuation, just blocks filled with characters, line after line, beautifully drawn.  The idea was art and transcendence, not a point of view or a plot.  But the other idea is to forestall the weakhearted, the ones who look at a fat gray block of words and think I do not have to climb up and into that.  Just bop bop bop, letting it wash, letting the words pour over.  Not thinking.  Breathlessness.  Courage.  An incendiary clause, a devastating proposition.  Go away.  Come here.  Touch foreheads.  Blink.  Blink.

Weeks clipping by

Yet another Friday.  It's a good day, offering a reprieve from whatever oppressed the week, a close of a paragraph in the chapter in the book.  But as so many of us have found, they just rocket by.  Not that they come quickly - few things come more slowly than Friday - but when they're here it seems so soon, the time is so compressed.  Maybe because Friday is a day with hope, and those hopes are what are flying past.

Back in St. Louis

It's hot, July, no rain lately and none coming.  The river is back down and barge traffic seems about equal, going upstream and coming down.  Two bridges across are in my window, a third is just to the south, and a fourth is soon to be completed, but this river is still a real border as it has long been.  An old slave state on one side, an old free one on the other.  Slaves were sold on the steps of the courthouse right below me; Lincoln lived on the other side.  There was a lot of back and forth, though.  Dred Scott's trial, which was also in the courthouse below, was about his going back and forth; Sherman lived here; Grant settled here; Robert E. Lee lived here and built a dam that saved the city from losing its landing on the river.

NYC 4am Monday

The city is hot now, so it's going to be a killer day.  The people up are car-movers like me, serious partiers, early shop owners, and the poor souls we used to call bums and now call homeless.  It's quiet, for the city, but you feel the thunder of a city day rolling in.

Not with a bang but a whimper

I think Eliot is mostly right.  Many do not - evidently even he revoked the idea - because they see an explosion ending the world.

Worlds, societies, networks, friendships, love affairs.  Their endings may start with a bomb, but there is always some measure of life in the rubble, and it isn't until that life dies, until there's nothing, no talk, no love, no life, that it's over.  And that sounds to me like a whimper.

Busted clavicle

For a teenage boy driver, the metal horses they put on subdivision streets are racing gates, allowing you to slalom through the neighborhood.  I recall it vividly.   But for middle ager on a bike, his head hanging low because the ride is getting long and sweaty, the horses are bad critters.  I ploughed into one the other day and went airborne, slo-mo, reconsidering my many faults, and landed with a crunch on my shoulder.

A broken collarbone, the left clavicle.  On the x-ray it looked like a busted branch.  May need surgery, but in the meantime I'm in a sling, looking like a kind of disabled vet.  I tried to spruce up the sling by using a madras necktie, but it looked a little crazy.  Like I really didn't know what to do with a tie, and so used it to hold up an arm.

Recalibration

This business of writing up in the Internet sky has changed a lot in my 10+ years of doing it, and I have tried to navigate the head winds, but the methods have spread me too thin and the result is really nothing I care about. So I could go back to writing for the drawer, but as I've posted here plenty of times, for me writing for the drawer means no writing at all. I still need the - what? - the mixture of choice, and risk, and spraying-my-tag-on-a-public-wall I get from putting my stuff out into the ether.

So now I'm out there, lots of ways. I'm in Google and Facebook and Twitter and wherever my Mac Air puts me. But I'm sick of seeing that I have become a dossier, a big fat file of marketing opportunity. I'm really sick of seeing other people - and their programs - attributing pictures, items, articles, places to me. I could go further up into all these social network levels, and many newer ones, and I probably would if I wanted to have, sooner or later, my own 15 minutes of fame. But Andy - I don't. I want what I deserve, no more, no less.

I hope I deserve the occasional reader, who will almost always be a friend from the rest of my life. So for the next tranche it's back here, back to this one place, Strays. Where I started. The readers will come and go one by one, via word of mouth. If it falls back to just one - me, when proofreading - and stays there, fine. This isn't a survey, or a convocation, or a collection plate. It's words, slung sidearm or overhand and curved, changed up, or fast. That's all.