10.
a sweet small apple
fresh coffee and the radio
morning painkillers
11.
sing on Tom Petty sing
the days drive, burn, and hurt
but still: horizon
[Day book 2026 // Spring 3.25.26]
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Poet. Essayist. Fictioner. Steamboat fireman. Bit of a grackle.
We’re in the wet season, what is probably a fool’s spring, and the snow and ice have melted. The skunks have started mating and the peeps, I am told, are peeping in the Olmstead Parks.
I can’t prove it, but I think I am saved by love and by eating an apple a day and by a spiritual subroutine that operates in the deep programming of my mind. It’s been decades, but I have been, since I became aware, been working at making subtle changes to the key operating system, digging out errata programming and faulty subroutines. An apple a day and a perpetual search for poetry, neither of which disappoints me, will be what saves this machine. As the body wears out I replace parts with titanium and with words and someday all that will remain is a beating heart that bleeds language and whatever spare metal parts there are. And then someday, the words will erode away, get carried on the wind and they will find new hearts. And then the reconfiguration will be complete.
The year of the Fire Horse comes ‘round once every 60 years, or so says the internet, which has gone from a depository of all information to a badly organized big box store where the search agents are underpaid and unhelpful and the expiration dates are … flexible. The fireworks at midnight disturbed a neither deep nor restful sleep. I wish I could blame current events but I find that the world intrudes on my interior geography the way water soaks into river rocks: immersed long enough, some water does seep in through the pores. But I learned a long time ago that I do not carry the entire weight of the world. My share is only what seeps in, and what I allow to remain.
I’m too busy looking forward to look down. I only wish that this slight fever had accompanying dreams.
A fresh pot of coffee on the stove,
an apple, a pipe, and a shower
and the world moves on
Blinded By the Light // this life informed by a Manfred Mann song / a guitar and keyboard riff that beats like a heart that never stops // I do not stop / I do not stop // until someday it will all stop
the songs are right // this is just one big space ship and we / and we / are float// ing
—
my 20’s were the death cult years
I’ve gone a little crazy a few times,
to the great disappointment of people
surprised they never saw it coming
and it was in my 20’s I learned
most people are fine sharing their sorrows
but it doesn’t leave any room in them
to share someone else’s
“I’m betting he’s gonna swerve first.” – Phil Connors, Groundhog’s Day (1993)
Listening to my brother talk about major and minor keys in music, Seattle grunge, and the Beach Boys Death Cult (my term). What made the Beach Boys songs work wasn’t so much the song writing but the compositions around their voices. The actual songs, most of them, were dark, sad songs. What we’re living now is the decline of a Post-War Death Cult fueled by Beach Boys-style nostalgia. I was always fond of “Sloop John B,” a cute little ditty about a terrible boat ride. Then there’s the existential angst of “God Only Knows,” which, in a different key and composition, could sound like a Nirvana cover band. “I may not always love you / but as long as there are stars above you / you never need to doubt it” is a proclamation of love wrapped in the belief that there’s nothing after we die and if the speaker were to die in some war or a drag race or something, the beloved would then have to find some other starry-eyed lover who could write a different song in the same key about the temporary nature of love in the nuclear age.
Today, of course, is Groundhog Day, when the small cult that protects the inheritor rodent of Punxsutawney Phil gets all gussied up and prognosticates the entrance of Spring; I think of the movie, with Bill Murray and Andi McDowell and someone asks Phil Connor, Murray’s character about whether it will be six more weeks of winter and he says something about March 20… which is generally the Spring Equinox. People act like The Big Lebowski (1998) is a super zen movie, but if I had to think of a movie that might be an extended koan, it would be Groundhog’s Day.
When you wake up to the same day, day after day, written by the same death cult that gave us “Barbara Ann,” the only possible reaction is to eat as many pancakes as you can, kidnap a sacred rat, and drive headlong into the long light at the end of a tunnel. Embracing the fun may be the most zen moment you will ever have, over and over again.
re
peat
rep
eat
sew
so
show
shovel
snow
go
sail
ing
go
leave
go
re
peat
