Kinda Sorta What I'm All About...

...in a dream was staying in a strange hotel and couldn’t find my room...went looking for it and realized I’d lost the floor it was on, too...then couldn’t even find the hotel....woke to find the world outside the window one big melted Slurpee...grey flavored...getting anywhere unscathed near impossible...

My business is words. Words are like labels,
or coins, or better, like swarming bees.
Anne Sexton, Said the Poet to the Analyst

...the only time I like to write by hand is when it’s really deep, go-for-broke personal stuff...so illegible even I can’t read it....when younger, wrote because I had nobody to talk to...nobody I trusted, at least...now sometimes think what I write's brilliant, but never fail to be amazed when anybody likes it...now working with a new computer keyboard just subtly different from the last...an inch or two smaller, maybe...my most passionate prose coming out ;o=lr ‘-ae...

Your business is watching my words. But I
admit nothing….
Anne Sexton, Said the Poet to the Analyst…

...Allen Ginsberg, when he was young, wrote poetry for his father...later, wrote something he had no intention of getting published, because he’d never want his father to read it...and that, apparently, allowed him to Howl…

Mind is the sole source of bondage or liberation.
Maitri Upanishad

...a rehab client who a week before checked and double checked to make sure she’d passed my reading comprehension test so she wouldn’t have to work with me said she really wanted to talk to me about doing some writing because she was going nuts in there...I said writing to keep from going nuts is what I’m all about...

Talking Books

pass here and go on, you’re on the road to heaven...
Jack Kerouac

...my dad had a flirtation with radicalism in the late 60’s...apparently....as far as I can tell, it never went beyond buying the books that, at one time, lined the top level of our living room bookshelf...before I found them, that is, and, deciding they’d be a perfect alternative to whatever crap was being assigned by my teachers in high school, took them: The Autobiography of Malcolm X and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, providing an angry, alternative history badly needed in the days of morning in America...Jack Kerouac’s On the Road and Allen Ginsberg’s Howl and other poems, introducing the notion that reading and writing could be really, really cool, particularly in the midst of endless road trips, cheap wine, tea-smoking, jazz, radical politics, and sex...Siddhartha by Herman Hesse (gotta confess, actually, that, at that point, I didn’t get the nonattachment thing at all...and, actually, I’m still workin’ on that)...and, most insane and influential of all, Woodstock Nation by Abbie Hoffman...We shall not defeat Amerika by organizing a political party. We shall do it by building a new nation—a nation as rugged as the marijuana weed born from the seeds of the Woodstock Festival...sounded cool to me, never mind that most charter members of the Woodstock Nation had cashed in a decade earlier, roughly around the time the draft ended, and helped create the Reagan Nation I was then so desperate to rebel against....

And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.
T. S. Eliot

...more recently, when visiting my mom, I comb through the shelves in my dad’s den...finding, to my surprise, in the midst of countless volumes on psychoanalysis, Quakerism, and the history of Christianity, things like Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs and Elaine Pagels’ Gnostic Gospels, along with Thich Nhat Hanh, Pema Chodron, and Jon Kabat Zinn...often featuring copious underlining and notes, which, along with the very presence of the books themselves, feel like a special kind of posthumous communication...with areas of surprising agreement, as well as the same old arguments, which had something to do with why we talked so little during his last years...so, I underline and make notes myself, but always make sure to do it in pencil when he used pen, just so it’s clear who said what....