tomorrow i leave wisconsin for chicago to have a new year with cole and melissa and molly and barnaby and other who's names i may not remember. it should be fun. it was a nice, mellow/low-key christmas. wisconsin is cold and snowy which is novel and short term so therefore exciting. the last couple days i've been getting in touch with my inner-painter so therefore i'm exhausted. enjoy the following megapixels, and heck, i don't know, have a happy new year.

brother ben made this blanket for niece beatrix

friend joel post village bar when the snow turned into rain and fog (spooky/pooky)father + brother at clearview

whell, it's the end of the semester yet again and whell, that's about it. i'm leaving san francisco for a month and half, the entire winter break, to visit my mother's house for christmas, will stop in chicago for new years, head to d.c. to my sister's for the beginning of january, hopefully stop by new york and also los angeles. it seems ambitious but i like to travel. it relaxes me, even more than playing the tuba. this semester has been another hum dinger and i'm going to take next semester off of teaching, though i will probably keep doing esl work and tutoring. maybe i will go into steamfitting or airplane repair. i sort of forget how to write in this blog but that's probably a good thing. i was perfectly content with having that st. vincent millay poem sit there for the next five years as the last, depressing post of somebody who got bored and abandoned their blog. maybe this will be the last blog post for this blog. recently i've gotten into some music software and it's been where my creative energies have been going, if you can call it creative. mostly i've been making bad techno music. it's pretty fun. once i figure out how to actually write a song, the next frontier, the music might get more interesting. is there a difference between writing a poem and a song? probably, but i figure that the drive needed to carry a poem out to completion is the same as the drive needed to carry a song out to completion. then again, making music on a computer is not exactly like opening a note book. it's confusing with all its bleep and blops and buttons. i've got to give it more time. anyway, it's a null day in san francisco. kind of cloudy, a little cold. sarah's coming by to drop off my hat and i work from three to nine.

The machine rattles and hums like it has a larger purpose in life, its function a part of the whole (the kitchen below, the restaurant's ventilation). Poetry was the first thing that anybody had told me I was good at, that I had a talent for and being in my last year of college having no idea what to do, I pursued it. People ask if I am still writing and I say of course, always. And this is true, but not as the center piece of my day.

I have to work, or rather, want to work in other capacities. The writers whose trajectories I find most appealing were all part-time in a sense: Wallace Stevens the insurance executive and George Oppen the labor organizer. Both had other lives that did not ever directly translate into poetry. Consummate outsiders, never fully beholden to either title, thereby creating a distance in which to write.

Free agents thus free to wander into any dream. The trouble with construction in the early morning is that it prevents free wandering into dreams. Seven thirty is when I first heard the jack hammers. They start early and work fluently until everyone else is awake, the language of breaking up concrete and tank tread.

Forrest asked, sincerely, do you like writing? I like the generation of words but don't like a work that translates into a kind of pyramid scheme: writing for relief, and this relief turning into something to sell. Pure innards, like pig intestines or a gutsy Academy Award winning performance, seem unsustainable in comparison to an on-going relationship with community. i.e. a dialogue with others, a role to play.

A bird landed on the fire escape and chirped in my direction. I looked for it; scanning the ledge and the rusty metal fire escape that climbs over the ledge, the bird frantically chirping over the rumble of machinery. As soon as I made eye contact, it flew away. Was it waiting to be seen? It seemed angry. Maybe it thought I was responsible for the noise and could put and end to it.

The sky is mostly clear, though the smell of construction wafts somewhere near. Unlike yesterday morning the noise is distant. It's possible they're just further down the street and instead, the peace is relative; a whole block or blocks of people experiencing what I did yesterday morning.

Bailout?

The True Encounter

"Wolf!" cried my cunning heart
At every sheep it spied,
And roused the countryside.

"Wolf! Wolf!"-and up would start
Good neighbours, bringing spade
And pitchfork to my aid.

At length my cry was known:
Therein lay my release.
I met the wolf alone
And was devoured in peace.

___-Edna St. Vincent Millay