Miercoles Wednesday 10 Marzo March 2010
81 Winter 25 Moon 53 Space.Age

1.

ANOTHER DAY. Yesterday evening we drove out to my stepbrother and sisterinlaw’s house in Grossmont for dinner celebrating the visit of their second daughter. They only have two, both young ladies in college. This one had flown from back east. For the past few years I made up names and fictionalized my family but now I am only telling the truth so I don’t tell names anymore.

My fiction you can find elsewhere. But not quite yet, to be honest. Oh, there are bits and pieces, but... here I will only tell the truth about my family. And no names.

My niece, she is still beautiful, of course. She and her sister are both beautiful, but in very different ways. One is delicate, the other rowdy. But then, the rowdy one is delicate, and the delicate one is healthier. Odd how lables always end up being false in one way or another. Except that they are both beautiful, intelligent, talented and... oh yeah just another old uncle proud of his nieces. I have been very fortunate in family. Very. All of us are cursed with brains and looks.

I drove Mom out there. That’s my job, now, you know. Helping Mom keep her big house and dogs and get around all the places she needs to go. The freeway was a little rough, especially the offramp out there, and we came very close to one car and she squealed and then apologized when I didn’t hit it, or did not get hit by the one racing up from behind in the lane we were evacuating.

We drove around the hill on a new road they put in only when they added the new freeway there. It has changed a lot since we lived in Grossmont forty years ago. But the house my brother and sisterinlaw bought twenty years ago is a house that was on my paper route when I was fourteen. I used to ride up and down those hills every day for two and a half years until I gave it up for poetry and 33andathird long play records. Still have some of those... the ones my first wife didn’t sell on me before we moved to Chicago for a year, aye, and a bunch of others I used to collect in thrift stores.

I wish I still had the turntable I got rid of before I moved to Tijuana. That was an excellent piece of electronics. Also from a thrift store.

Long stories turn short as the years fly by.

Often times I wonder now, as I struggle to be patient with my mother’s problems, often times I wonder what I could ever say about myself that anyone would want to hear?

A few poems interest one or two people. A few videos get some response. But on the whole I am just another artist.

A wasted brain who could have been an important tool for the machine.

And now that I got fat again after quitting tobacco three years ago... or was it four...

Yes, I think the worse thing about me is my obesity. If I can lose a hundred pounds, no, a hundred and fifty...

That is one thing I could do to improve my life and mere existence. Lose seventy kilograms.

Then go to Rome and walk around the ruins of empire.

2.

I finally lived up to one of my biggest resolutions and submitted three poems to a magazine today.

They have to be unpublished poems, so you have never seen them.

Not here, not livejournal, not anywhere.

Them's the rules.

The rules specifically say AND NOT INTERNET NEITHER

So, for the past two or three years I have been NOT publishing some of my poems on the web. Not here, not at livejournal, not nowhere.

Them's the rules, folks. The big boys want first crack at your shit. Well, I hope they like my shit. It's a damn competitive world. But if I don't jump in the water, I will never be lucky enough to drown.