On the left is my left thumb, newly diagnosed as a fracture. You can see a little tip pointing pointing to the center of the ball? That is part of the fracture and it divides the bone on the way to the finger nail. On the right is my right thumb, which, as you can see, is smooth. My new doctor said it will take a year for the swelling to completely subside. He also said said that the FPL tendon attaches at the volar lip of the distal phalanx. The volar lip of the distal phalanx. The volar lip of the distal phalanx...

The people who park their cars around Lake Merritt have always been strange to me. Usually on the east side of the lake, when I walk around or run around, or decide to go sit and read or whatever, I see them. They sit in their cars, usually with the windows rolled down, sometimes napping, sometimes reading, sometimes smoking or chatting, texting, or hanging out with their girl, behind tinted windows or in trucks, or in an Acura Legend with the windows cracked and sometimes there's music, gospel or classical or the quiet boom of dampened bass. I think, why would a person want to sit in a car? When they could get out, sit on the grass or a bench, and everybody can see them just sitting there. Why would a person go out of their way, to drive here to sit in their car?

So yesterday, now that I have a car I like to sit in, on my way back from buying cat food, with a back pack full of papers to grade (A-, D, B-, D+, B+ etc.) I pulled into a spot and cracked the windows, pushed back my seat, and sat by the lake in my car. A breeze came through. The sounds of sea gulls and pairs of a walkers chatting, walking through the frame and disappearing. I could see the wind blowing in on the lake, the rowers rowing and across the water, the boat house and the over priced restaurant, and behind that, the skyline of downtown Oakland. The sun was high enough to shine but the piece of metal and plastic that separates the windshield from the driver side door blocked the glare. Nobody paid me any attention at all.

People watching. Though not really, a couple hours trying to get work done. Did I mention it was quiet? Maybe home is not so much and it's hard to catch a nap at work. But you'll see that all the time in certain neighborhoods. On Dara's street, the one that lines the creek she sees them too. Sitting, mostly napping or texting. California. With a car I feel that I'm entering the main stream of Oakland. Merging like a blood cell into a major artery, swept up and moving toward the center. The center of what I don't know. The man who pulled in next to me gave me a nod. My neighbor offered to help me parallel park. The guy at the gas station helped me figure out why the door kept sticking. California. Cars. People, and what we do.

Hi. How are you? Is conversation a lost art? I don't know but have read a lot in the last week about how lonely, shallow, and isolated we are. In the New Yorker, one about Couch Surfing . com and the other about that book about living alone. I gave the magazine away so can't quote from either article at the moment, but they both keep pointing to our strong desire to surround ourselves with people like ourselves. On the radio this morning a man spoke about the isolating properties of Facebook and the Sunday paper lead off with this article, about the fact that we don't talk to each other anymore. Talking about ourselves, talking about talking about ourselves. So, yesterday, I went for a hike instead. It was warm out and I got sweaty and there were pretty little blue flowers through the valley and up onto the ridge.

The good news is that my left thumb is much better. I took the slint/splint/sling off on Saturday, put it back on Sunday and am wearing it now. But it doesn't hurt like it did. On the road to recovery, though I won't be able to play basketball for some time, and the other thing, from the last knuckle up, my finger is rotated about five degrees counter-clockwise and I can't bend it more than a little. It's still quite swollen and looks like a prosthetic appendage, devoid of life attached to my hand. I should make another appointment but insuranceless, am hesitant. Watching the basketball game the other day, the announcer said, in reference to the player formerly known as Ron Artest, "Metta World Peace is going to do some damage in the playoffs."

Last, an excerpt from the introduction to Uncreative Writing, a book of essays by Kenneth Goldsmith about approaches to writing that involve anything but generating new material, from reappropriation to collage to sampling. I'm jealous of this assignment. He writes,

Each semester, for their final paper, I have them purchase a term paper from an online paper mill and sign their name to it, surely the most forbidden action in all of academia. Each student then must get up and present the paper to the class as if they wrote it themselves, defending it from attacks by the other students.

He sometimes holds classes entirely in Second Life, and when in a real classroom, encourages students to open their computers and plug in. I'm not sure if any of this is "good" but it's interesting. Hope all is well. It's overcast in Oakland today. Or better yet, check this out.

M y h an d is injured. The left thumb knuckle is HYPEREXTENSION INJURY/CONTUSION L THUMB AT DIP with a cast. So the good news is that I can write with the right hand but can't type with both so forget it. Here's one new song on the other blog.

Untitled

When the cats come and sleep on my legs I don't dream about cats. And when I eat late at night I don't dream about food. When I wake up I sometimes remember what I have dreamt because I mean to remember it. It's no secret: math is best explained by more math. The meaning of graffiti is to have somebody graffiti over it. The meaning of Sunday is Monday. The meaning of my dream is the meaning I give, a horoscope or asking a friend for guidance. Or asking an old man for forgiveness. Or when he's blind, in the dream, he asks me to ferry him across the street. The Earth is round and filled with oily water. The fact of fear reeks and hatred abounds.

It's Spring Break. Day three. Tomorrow I'm headed to DC and will be back Monday. Please excuse this temporary extraneous break in the action. It's been very busy outside of the regular routine. Saturday Sunday hang out events, and then Monday down to Santa Cruz, to visit friends and look at a car. Planning my move, and needing a car in Indiana, I bought one. Dara's driving it to work right now but it's somewhere around here. It's a real car, a little scary to own something that large, but I'm real excited to own a car again. As my mom said, "You like driving."

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Much to my surprise, I received this email earlier today.

Church Reminder:

Reminder: You, Reed Huff, and Michel Richmond are assigned to clean the church today.

Thanks!

Bishop Bumbaugh

So I wrote back, "I think you have the wrong email address." I think because it's possible that this is a message from god, somehow, and in fact, I should be sweeping the church today. Or it's possible that the right guy might not get this email, so who is going to sweep the church now? Reed and Michael? Again, even if this isn't a message from god, it seems like the right thing to do is to make sure the church gets cleaned. All that said, I can't go right now. If the Bishop had asked me ahead of time I could be there right now, getting things ready. But I'm not, and won't be there, and it's such a nice day in Oakland. Warm. I go to DC on Thursday, and until then, I'm going to try and relax. Spring.

At noon today, instead of attending a talk by Jay Rubin and J. Philip Gabriel, the translators of 1Q84 and many other Haruki Murakami books, something I've been looking forward to since last week, I opted to play basketball. Weird.

____________

In 2005 I participated in a study that had something to what parts of the brain were affected by certain sounds. The scientists put me in an MRI machine and gave me headphones, and two buttons, one for my right hand and one for my left. Depending on which side I heard the sound on (left or right), I was supposed to press the button. I don't know what they did with this knowledge but they gave me some pictures of my brain.

The sly interplay between the old fox, Red Ivy, and Beth Szabo, the Forest Management Team Supervisor, part of the 1999 ad campaign for the Ford F-150 Supercrew. Larry Broadway is the fixer. He can fix any machine you put in front of him. He's not always the best company but he's awfully handy to have around. Mack FairCloth is the driver, him and Rick Rozar take turns. Of course when they're driving "with that full back seat, your knees aren't touching your chin." Bobby Boutwell and Rick play poker on the weekend but the rest of the crew don't always get an invite.

What kinds of words get passed between Rick and Larry in back seat, Red barking orders while Beth hunches over a map. What do they talk about? Bobby's thinking about buying a new motorcycle and Mack mostly keeps to himself. So much can go unsaid on your way to work, but when you've got somebody like Red to stir the drink, ribbing Rick about his losing habits, or sparring with Mack about the best way to get over West River Ridge, the silence doesn't last long.

"Fuck Larry Broadway. Fuck Red Ivy. Fuck Mack FairCloth. Fuck our fucking names" Bobby muttered.

"What's that?" yelled Red over the wind, sitting on Bobby's left. Ears like a field mouse.

"Nothing." said Bobby, picking his head up and going back to what he was doing.

"You're going to want to take the left fork up ahead." Beth said from the back, knees not touching her chin, "We can pass around the base and come up the other side. It's a little less intense."

"Alright," said Mack, "I understand." He gives it a little more gas and the truck bounds out of sight down the left fork. In the empty forest, an owl turns it's head and hoots directly into the wall, and every wood pecker, grub, chipmunk and elk within three hundred yards looked up, and then went back to what they were doing.

This August I am moving to Indiana to attend Purdue's Composition and Rhetoric program. It will be about two and a half years of course work followed by a dissertation that seems to take most a year and a half, possibly two. If all goes well, I'll end up with a PhD. All the fees are waived plus a stipend and health insurance provided I teach one class a semester, which of course I will, beginning this August. This is all good and exciting news, old news if I've spoken to you in person anytime in the last couple months, but serious life changes await and I've been doing a lot of thinking, chatting, moving towards planning, about what these next four months are going to look like.

As much complaining as I've done about my employer in the last five years, I am so ready, in part because of the trial by failure after failure my hair is turning white rapidly, to formally study Rhetoric and Composition. A study of what writing is, how it can be taught, a history and sociology of the written word, along side philosophy and theory. There's formal rhetoric, ancient Greeks and Aristotle, what we like to think western civilization is based on, there's rhetorics of particular groups of people, say the rhetoric of the medical profession or the rhetoric of twitter, and there's also more philosophical and psychological questions about how we identify with the written word, and how we come to ideas through articulation. This is what I'm most interested in, a kind of applied philosophy in the context of the classroom. And there's another part about the actual nuts and bolts of classroom application, so it's also a kind of an education degree.

I might be wrong about some of this, but that's what I understand about "Rhet/Comp." Teaching writing for six plus years has gotten me pretty curious about what exactly I've been doing this entire time. Teaching writing, along with ESL and pronunciation, alongside my own writing, poetry and whatnot (this blog qualifies as "whatnot") has lead to many many questions about what actually works and why. I'd like to be able to not just teach and write, but to talk about what it all means in a context outside of my own experience. Plus I'd like to get paid three to four times what I'm making currently. Which leads me back to complaining about the insanely dysfunctional bureaucracy that is my employer. I can do that now that I'm leaving. But I won't. Freedom!

Hi. It's about noon on Monday. It was supposed to be raining but its not. As I keep saying: we need the rain because it's been very dry. Dry like a bone or a dry rock. This weekend I went hiking up Dry Rock where I could see all the way to Dry Bone Valley. Not true. It rained all day Saturday and into Sunday. Made music on Friday watched an old movie with Dara on Saturday. On Sunday I went to visit Amy and Steven's new baby. Very cute. Then came home and finished the last hundred fifty pages of Reamde, the newish Neal Stephenson that was really hard to stop reading. Normally this is good when it comes to novels, but it felt a little yucky at times, addicted to turning pages. A thousand plus and now I am free to read something not so controlling.

You may notice to the right that I've added a blog, a Tumblr account that I'm going to use for posting articles that I used to post on Google Buzz, the now defunct social media service that worked though gmail. Buzz worked well for me, but apparently nobody else liked it, so it disappeared along with my ability to share articles. There are many services that do this, but my doubts about sharing information with strangers and gigantic companies that mine my data to sell it back to me always keeps me from committing to an entrenched matrix of public internet activity indicators. I still regret the time I filled out my Facebook profile after drinking a full cup of Theraflu. Even though I erased what I wrote, it's still out there. No doubt, in the middle of a job interview ten years from now they'll ask me how often I abuse over the counter painkillers.

One of my proudest internet moments was deleting my Facebook account last Spring, after I had to reject a student's request to be Facebook friends. I never know what to do in these situations, and so decided that instead of grappling with this question at the end of every semester, I would just delete the question itself. I never used it anyway. I'm an introvert you know, and sharing my junk via somebody else's tightly controlled system always made me squeamish. This blog is personal but I leave large swaths of my life unmentioned. Which are usually the parts and stories that make me look bad. Maybe they can come up with a service that will let us be the assholes we really are. But don't get me wrong. I love the internet, and am happy to have a platform that enables me to write whatever and put it out there. Magical tools that enable us to build houses, or put people in the hospital. As if anything outside of ourselves could satisfy us.

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Who designs noodles? Is there somebody in charge?
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A little introduction to this poem: Lorine Niedecker was a poet, Wisconsin born and raised and died, who was loosely affiliated with the second wave of modernists, a small group of "Objectivist" poets, that included Charles Reznikoff, Louis Zukofsky, and George Oppen. They were largely influenced by the visual art esque poetry of William Carlos Williams (think The Red Wheel Barrow), the idea that there is "no ideas but in things." Niedecker wrote in the vein but was not published much until the 60's, when all of a sudden she became a little more popular until her death in 1971.

During the 50's she wrote a series of poems called For Paul, for the new born son of Louis Zukofsky, who she had a long running correspondence with. However during the 30's Zukofsky and Niedecker had a love that resulted in an abortion. During the 40's, when Paul was born, they continued to correspond and these For Paul poems were based on what Zukofsky said about his son's growth. Niedecker never had any children herself. The poems were a mix personal information alongside larger historical events, though they were never published due to Zukofsky's discomfort with them. Here is one these poems:

Understand me, dead is nothing
whereas here we want each other,
silence, time to be alone
and Paul's growing up—
baseball, jabber, running off to neighbors
and back into the Iliad—"do you really believe
there were gods, all that hooey?"
And his violin—improvising
made a Vivaldi sequence his,
better than I could have done with poetry
at twice his age...
so write your father, L. before P.

A start in life for Paul.
The efforts of a life
hold together as Einstein's
and lead to expectations of form.

To know, to love ... if we know nothing,
Baruch the blessed said, would we exist?

For Paul then at six and a half
a half scholarship—
turn the radio dead—
tho your teacher's gone back to Italy
stumped by American capital.

In my mind, the child said,
are rondeau-gavottes 1 to 11,
here is number 12.

Bluebird

You can't expect
the milk to be delivered
to your house
by a bluebird
from a picture book
you looked at
at the age of four:
he's much older
now, can't carry those
bottles 'neath his wing,
can hardly even carry a tune
with his faded beak
that opens some nights
to leak out a cry
to the horrible god
that created him.

Don't think I'm
the bluebird, or that
you are. Let him get
old on his own and
die, like a real bluebird
that sat on a branch
in a book, turned his head
toward you, and radiated.


________-Ron Padgett

Two Quotes

"I said to them, look at the Taliban. They believe in their cause, and that sustains them. You people have no cause. You don't believe in anything. And these guys just sat there in their chairs. They agreed with me."

"In rural communities especially there's very strong feeling that the land belongs to you and you belong to it, and if you lose that, you're not just dislocated physically, but you start to lose a sense of who you are."

**

An Afghani businessman talking to other Afghani businessmen and Kai Erikson on displacement.

Freedom Story

After eleven years of slaving over the hot stove
a yellow bird came to
tell her she didn't have to do it anymore. This freedom

was all consuming, like a grease fire
late at night when all you have to fight it is a grease
monkey fire. "Where will I go?" she asked herself.

"What will I do without this claptrap husband of mine,
this virtual Tiger Woods of a bitch?"
What is the opposite of sitting in a patch of flowers?

What is the square root of decision?
"It's not an emergency," she thought, "I can stay here for as long as I like."
Silent dreamer! I want to hatch from a dragon's egg!

We need more training to leave the dojo.
Seventeen years isn't a short time at all to become a master.

From the Haruki Murakami book What I Talk About When I Talk About Running:

I don't think most people would like my personality. There might be a few - very few, I would imagine - who are impressed by it, but only rarely would anyone like it. Who in the world could possibly have warm feelings, or something like them, for a person who doesn't compromise, who instead, whenever a problem crops up, locks himself away in alone in a closet?

These are the ingredients for my new shaving cream/gel: Organic Sucrose, Organic White Grape Juice, Organic Coconut Oil, Organic Olive Oil, Organic Shikakai Powder, Organic Fair Deal Hemp Oil, Organic Jojoba Oil, Organic Corn Starch, Organic Lemongrass Oil, Organic Lemon Oil, Organic Lime Oil, Citric Acid, Tocopheral.

It's like smearing food on my face, and then shaving it off with plastic razor. It smells like food, and I think as I shave, if things get tough, I could probably eat my shaving gel/jelly, maybe put it on a piece or bread or leather.