It's a warm day in Indiana, warm for winter, no snow on the ground and the sun is shining directly into my eyes as I write this. School resumes on the 13th and until then I'll be here working on various writing, reading, and music projects, sleeping in and trying to remember how to cook, and after the New Year going up to the meditation center to do some sitting and some service work. So, I've posted more this year than any year since 2007. Being in school surrounds me with interesting people and ideas, and its rigor keeps me firmly entrenched in habitual content production, whether I like it or not. This is one reason I've written so much. The other is that is that the writing took on an urgency that I've rarely felt before, convinced that I could change the material future directly with words. Over the Fall I continued to indulge this impulse, and my system, rewired over the Spring and Summer, is still grasping for reasons and causes to explain the disconnect between my ideas of what love can accomplish and reality as it played out.

**

My gizmo is probably just tired. To put it another way, while I like to think that all my experience mediating, adademicing, and articulating the minutiae of my feelings has given me a modicum of control over the future, I think what it's really done is helped me write more words, with the end goal of typing a single word that makes everybody's computer explode into a terrific light of happiness. This sent to me recently by a friend, translated from the Kurundogai, a book of Tamil poetry compiled around 2AD:

It was midday in summer. There was some butter on a rock; it was melting in the heat of the sun. There's a person who's supposed to be watching the butter--to make sure it doesn't melt. He's just watching it melt. He can't do anything. He has no legs, no hands, he can't speak, so what on earth can he do? He's just watching the butter melt. Like this, love has spread over my body like a disease.

**

I turned 35 in November, which is significant not because of the number, but because I had never really considered my life beyond the age of 34. I guess I assumed that certain things would happen by this time and that I would naturally be a different person...no need to plan as my future self would take care of that. I assumed that I would have found some kind of stability in my work and romantic life. Neither has happened. On the one hand this could be seen as a failure, where on the other it means that I'm in the bonus.

**

 “He had elbow pasta, and I had shell pasta, and I told him how my shell pasta was better than his elbow pasta, and he was pretty upset about that. He loves elbow pasta. But I disagreed. I think shell pasta is better. I don’t care. I will stand by that. Shell pasta.”

-Metta World Peace (formerly known as Ron Artest) in response to a reporter's question about an altercation during the game.

**                                                           
 
I finally got a smart phone. I've made an Instagram account and signed up for Twitter. So far I've posted three pictures to Instagram and nothing yet to Twitter. Still not sure about that one. But even better, I finally have a camera that can take real pictures and videos with, like this one:

Thus I move into another diaristic area of media consumption. It seems to be where people are, so I'd like to be there too. Or at the very least, I'd like to be able to capitalize on the three times a week or so that I have the impulse to take a picture, and share it with my three (so far) followers.

**

After dinner on Christmas, all of us still sitting at the table, my aunt pulled out a pack of "wish papers." Thin little tissue papers that you first crinkle up, and then roll into a structure that will stand vertically on a flat surface. In this case, our plates. You then light the paper on fire from the top and as it burns down you make a wish. When the flame reaches the bottom the heat propels what is now ash into the air, and if you can catch the ash as its falling back to earth you get your wish. We did this, first my brother and then my aunt. We made our way around the table (my mom didn't get her first wish but on the second try she got it), including my brother's 18 month old son. He wanted "more" (which he indicated with a hand signal) and so my brother and I both lit one more and made one more wish. The ash rose and fell, and landed in our hands.

The night before I left Lafayette I went to the grocery store to pick up some cat litter. I also got some beer, cat food, a cylinder of oatmeal, and three frozen pizzas. The cashier asked me if I babied my cat, and I said not really, and mumbled something about him sleeping a lot. I really baby mine, she smiled and said as she put my groceries into plastic bags. I put the bags into the cart and reached back to get the cat litter which was still sitting on the conveyor belt. It was heavy, and I quietly grunted as the lady behind me in line stood watching. "That's why I don't have cats," she said to no one in particular. I turned and pushed my cart towards the exit and as I was walking, thinking about that lady, about Indiana, a guy hands me a piece of paper folded into thirds. I said thanks, and continued walking out the doors, through the parking lot to my car.

I figured the piece of paper was some kind of religious message, as the guy seemed a little sheepish giving it to me. In my experience its an unusual event in Indiana to have someone actually put something into your hands. "Indiana nice" as far as I can tell, is a kind of hands off politeness. Opinions are offered but not put upon you. The mysterious and un-articulated discourses of the mid-west. I turned the car on and unfolded the piece of paper. A hundred dollar bill fell out. I looked at it making sure it was real and wondered what the catch was. I read the letter:

I thought, wow. My next thought was about the guy. And then I thought about what I was going to do with the money. I don't consider myself to be someone in need so the question was who I was going to give it to. 

I got home, put away the groceries, and went over to my neighbors to return some dishes and chat. The whole experience made me think, kind of like a performance that demands audience participation. Only in this case instead of an art world impetus, the kind of activist art that I became familiar with living in the uber-political Bay Area, the gesture seemed to come out of a religious impetus. The two oddly similar in their thought and guilt provoking effect. So I talked about it with my neighbors, and because I didn't want to randomly profile "people in need," and couldn't think of any people I knew off the top of my head who needed a hundred dollars more than the next person, they suggested giving it to the food bank located at the end of the street. A little bit the opposite of what the man who handed me the money was doing, putting himself out there. The next morning on my way out of town I gave the money to the lady at the food bank's desk. I told her the story and said, "weird huh?" And she said yeah. And then I got in my car and drove to Wisconsin. The only part about this experience that made me feel "good" was getting rid of the money.

last night i had a dream that i had 3.2 bitcoins

no context. but now the semester is over, or at least the classes are. in about ten days i will be able to say that the semester is really over, two papers, one class to grade, and one set of final evaluations to fill out. my writing students finished their podcasts and they were generally pretty good and most of my OEPP students were certified (to teach courses) so that is also good news. if i worked hard on anything this semester it was teaching. i know that the blog has been quiet lately but well, i've probably said enough to last at least until the new year. and i am so looking forward to the break and getting some rest, maybe going to new york, and getting back to creative work. finishing up a new collection of music and debating how to go about a few different writing projects. applying for some grants and to the TESOL certificate program. that is to say, i got nothing to say, plenty to do, and it's cold as hell not a leaf on a tree the birds have all went south. the river is low and calm and the moon. from the last paragraph of No Country For Old Men, Cormac McCarthy:

I had two dreams about him after he died. I dont remember the first one all that well but it was about meetin him in town somewheres and he give me some money and I think I lost it. But the second one it was like we was both back in older times and I was on horseback goin through the mountains of a night. Goin through this pass in the mountains. It was cold and there was snow on the ground and he rode past me and kept on goin. Never said nothin. He just rode on past and he had this blanket wrapped around him and he had his head down and when he rode past I seen he was carrying fire in a horn the way people used to do and I could see the horn from the light inside of it. About the color of the moon. And in the dream I knew that he was goin on ahead and that he was fixin to make a fire somewhere out there in all that dark and all that cold and I knew that whenever I got there he would be there. And then I woke up.