What I Did Last Week

I'm the Art Merit Badge Counselor for our Troop (that my son graduated from 6 years ago) Staples, with the Laker Org has this annual kids contest for a Laker Poster. The winner gets a $1,000.00 (The fine print says, I discovered after I did this, was the prize is actually a $1,000.00 Gift Card for Staples). So, the question was: how do you take the parameters and create something that looks like the kids really did do it and it doesn't look too horrible. I'm the Collage man, if nobody's realized it yet (take a look at my glue and oil paint things on the Redbubble link here) So I printed out a whole bunch of Laker photos and told the kids to cut them out and tape them on these little squares of fabric they gave us and draw the rest. The ribbons were supplied as well as the markers to draw with. The kids taped and drew Monday night and I called in sick Wednesday and spent the whole day gluing and tying the whole thing together. Only ended up with 4 Kobes on it. I was hoping for less, but that's who the kids know. What do you want? It's kids art. 

Susie

I talk to this lady every year - sometimes twice a year. She's my age, has a 41 year-old-daughter (which means she had her when she was 19 or 20) , a diabetic husband who hasn't got a lick of sense. The lord froze up her flower refrigerator twice in the last year, so she decided to get out of the flower business. No one buys flowers for funerals in Tennessee any more which was more than half of her business. You can get salvation here along with your cake. She arranged to get me a potted plant to go with my cake this year. She personally delivers 'em to my 87 year-old mother who lives out on Riva Ridge Road and will stop and chat. She might even be talked into a cup of tea. She's thinking about taking a morning job and opening her shop after lunch- just until things get better. I was telling her about our friend that had to go to Vietnam to tech English because she couldn't find a job in the states. You can call her and get a bit of that Tennessee accent. She takes Credit Cards and will call you back long distance if she's busy. The cakes are good, my Mom says.

The Poem About Sky Blue- I didn't forget

This was back before the day of easy reproductions. The teacher asked if the painting was an abstract and I told him yes and he marked it with an "A" and handed it back. The painting is by Kandinsky.

Beyond Baroque

So I came to Los Angeles. After struggling for awhile, we ended up living east of here by just a few blocks and I went to check it out. Their poetry workshops were ok. I decided I would volunteer to do a fiction writing workshop for them. This was 1982.

I was full of myself and what I was working on. I was serious. This was the Bibliography for the workshop:

If this wasn't enough to scare folks off, I obviously wasn't doing my job correctly. I would analyze everyone's work by whether they were writing perfect paragraphs or not. People would come, there was one lady that came and read a marvelous story about an anorexic girl that the more she starved herself, the larger she became, until she was fifty feet tall. A television writer showed up and invited me to come to a workshop in Westwood that was run by an old radical from the 50's that she would start up whenever she was out of jail for her various protests. People came and went and I didn't seem to be able to get people to come back. Then a guy presented himself to the guy would ran the foundation and told him he could do a better job and he would bring in more people. So they fired me and made him the Workshop guy. It might have been Jack Grapes, who has been running little workshops around Venice for 20 years, but I don't really remember. I do recall my wife at the time giving a very very cold shoulder to the director of Beyond Baroque when we ran into him at a grocery store. She was loyal.

I went back a few years ago, looking for a fiction workshop and tried out theirs. Two guys attended. One couldn't write at all and the other could barely speak English, so he would write in Urdu and then try to translate it into English. I wished them well and never went back.

The Boy Actually Goes Back To School

So off we went from San Francisco to Tucson with baby in tow. 1980 or there abouts. The Ex- had convinced me that I should finish my degree and enroll in a Creative Writing Program. She was concerned that I was not as educated as she was, and might have self worth issues. This was the woman that didn't want me washing dishes, because the man wasn't supposed to be doing that, but she also never did them herself. I looked through the choices of Creative Writing Programs around the country and decided on U of A because Tucson was a mid-sized city and I wanted to hedge my bets on finding a job when we got there. We sold my motorcycle, rented a trailer and a car and went to Phoenix. The Ex's friends towed the trailer the rest of the way and we found an apartment. It took me almost three weeks to find a job. I was getting scared. We got food stamps and I went to get a free bag of groceries every week. The school wouldn't take me full time because my grades from 1970-72 weren't good enough. I was also writing a new novel at the time and wanted to finish the first draft. The Ex finally found a job and her parents paid for day care so I could make classes that I was finally in and so I could sleep some, since I was working graveyard. The classes were nothing to write home about. I had one poetry teacher who thought I was brilliant, and was going to get me in the program, "if I was still there next semester" (that's what he said) Well, he had seen my sort before I guess. The only thing I recall writing was an abstract poem about Kandinsky's Sky Blue. If I find it, I'll put it here.

The Ex went to LA for job and took our daughter along. I was tired and disgusted with working seven nights a week and making hardly any money and the Writing Program was rinky dink and they didn't really want me, so I quit all over again. I followed the Ex to LA and began my search for the perfect paragraph- for years I was writing the seamless paragraph. I wanted to be like Flaubert and tap the cadence of my words out as I wrote them.
 

The Sad Face Of It

I went to San Francisco and went to the Public Library cause I heard they had a Writer's Workshop and I thought it might be like New Orleans. There was this guy, who was actually a lot older (probably in his sixties and this was 1978 or so, so he's probably dead now. He ran the Workshop. He had been an actor, and had gone in to have some plastic surgery done when he was in his forties and there had been a mistake made and one side of his face was paralyzed. He sued and sued and had a couple more operations to try to repair the damage and then to try to repair the damage that aging does to a paralyzed face. Anyway, he was not wonderful. He would tell anyone that would listen about how his life had been shattered and he had nothing left and his career was basically gone forever And so he was writing. He would stand up in front of a room with all the chairs facing him and he would call on you and then you would stand and read and then he would critique thoroughly and then let others comment and then he would move on. His writing was dumb. He didn't really know much about the whole process. I went back a couple more times, but it wasn't fun and he really was an asshole.

 

I'm sure I did it

I haven't been able to find it, but there was a catalog from Monterey Community College with me listed as running a Writer's Workshop. It was brown and looked like a little chapbook. Things were pretty loose in those days. I recall going to a meeting at the college and offering to do it and told them that I ran the Workshop in New Orleans, which I really did for a while. So they gave me a class to run. I wasn't being paid, that must have been the reason it was so easy. I only did it for one quarter. I sort of remember some young faces and absolutely none of the writing we worked on. Or any of the people. Perhaps I should just claim some writers that are publishing best sellers that are the correct age and swear that they were all there in my workshop. This was '76. I was finishing my very first full novel- which still remains not so hot. The words flow and flow. I fell in love and it was time to move on to SF. Now that I think of it, I don't think anyone ever saw the book except those folks that turned me down for publishing it. And the typist. I didn't read it to any one in the workshop. Maybe the ex-wife read it.

A entire day of music

This is what it looked like in Long Beach in Saturday morning. I'm in the back just left of the tree, The old guy to my left was playing the dobro really well. I gave him my banjo because he said he had wished he brought his. But when he started to play, he was having trouble because everyone was playing too slow. I was telling everyone that we're in trouble if he comes back with his banjo. I had problems, it took me a while to get my sense of rhythm going and then I keep getting lost in trying to follow the music. The jug band rehearsed at my house the night before and we played from 7 to 11. Maybe my brain had music hangover. I wonder what the cure is? (I used to tell people that the cure for a real serious alcoholic hangover was a pound of bologna, a loaf of bread and a 1/2 gallon of apple juice- if you could down all that without throwing up, you were cured.)  I took a break to go grocery shopping and then headed back down near here for a gospel jam at a lady's house (who usually comes to this thing in the park). A bit too much Jesus, but the music is good and the company was better. The music was all around me growing up in Indiana. There used to be gospel hours on the radio on Sunday mornings. Still too much Jesus. The lady and her husband ordered in pizza and salad for all. I'm supposed to be eating salad these days, but haven't had pizza in a long long time. It was very good.

Just Singing

Did this one and one more of my original songs Wednesday night again. I butchered this one because of nerves, but the MC came over later to say how much he liked my original song. Maybe one of these days I put some of those up here. Going off to play with the band at my house tonight, the Saturday morning group in the morning.

The One That Changed Everything

This show was toward the end of my stay in New Orleans. The Writer's Group met in the NO Public Library, was it once a week? I walked in and found Ralph Hudson and Meredith Nelson and Mike Halle and Melinda Frazier. A lot of folks came and went. Ralph was older, good-looking and had a southern gentleman's air about him. He became or was the resident wise man. Meredith (now Mike) beneath beard and general coloring looked and talked exactly like my buddy Jim back in Indiana. It was a bit scary, the resemblance, but we became friends right away. And I met his wife and we liked each other and we did things like take drives out in the countryside and we went fishing and down to the gulf together. Mike was a kind of well-off Med School drop-out whose father was supporting him for a year while he wrote a novel. I read the entire thing: "Jeremy Stopp" was the title. It was long and boring and nothing happened. I had dinner at his parents big house and met his little old Jewish granma. Melinda was a midwest girl and pretty as all get out and we talked with an ease I had never had with any woman. Lamont showed up, reading wonderful prose and he and I got to be friends and his painter friend Tom and Amy who Lamont married later and is still married to. Amy directed the thing above. I felt like Andy Hardy- we were putting on a show! Anyway, we worked. We read out loud and critiqued every word. We were all not that great, but we worked at it. A lady came that wrote for the weekly paper and had intended to make great fun of us, but then gave up the idea once she realized how seriously we were trying to do something good. And I was writing almost every night. Jan and Richard came later.

This was the program. It's a shame, I really don't remember any of the pieces except my own and the giant cardboard painting of bathroom urinals that Tom Kosbab painted as a prop. Of course, I still have my fragment of "The Lone Seeker" which became a 100,000 word manuscript that was long and boring and only occasionally did something happen. It never made it out of the first draft, though I was sure it was going to be just as good as James Joyce's Ulysses. What a time it was.

I left cause nobody that I wanted wanted me. Jan married Richard and had a kid. Lana divorced Mike and ran off with a professor for her first fling.

We are scattered. Mike's in Texas finally married to somebody. Lamont and Amy are Florida. Ralph moved to Biloxi and opened a art gallery last I heard (30 years ago) and married that girl I think. Melinda became a lawyer but never practiced and died a few years ago of cancer or some such. Don't know where Halle ended up. He's probably a doctor now. Kosbab is in New Mexico. Jan is out in the county side in Louisiana, painting, There's a link to her art here.

At that age, 22, I would only talk to you if you were a writer or painter or was living with one. Thank god I found these folks. It would've been very lonely.  

Workshops I've Known #2

There was a little poet grouping I went to once in Bloomington before I left forever. It was in a bookstore on Kirkwood about two blocks from campus. There were going to be a couple of poets there that were in a chapbook with my Journalism & English teacher from high school, and I thought he might show up.

Roger's Sample 

Anyway, he didn't show. And he was a lot younger then, probably not more than 10 years older than me which would have put him in his late twenties or early thirties. This is what he looks like now. 

I recall that everyone was very polite and if they criticized my poetry, it wasn't very mean. It was pretty bad stuff back then and they should of told me to go away. This was pre-really sitting down every day and writing every day. I had a stack of stuff that was overly metaphored and a novel I had scratched on for a couple of years. There were a couple of short stories and a few pages from a bad porn novel I decided I would write.

I had planned to go back the next month, but I hitchhiked off to New Orleans

Writers Groups I Have Known

Ok, so we were a little older than this, but not by much. I had written a short story in 10th grade about a kid that gets off work at the A & W and then goes to a party and gets drunk and moons over a girl that he wanted. Titled it after the Tandy story in Winesburg, Ohio. Well, the whole English Department told me I was a genius. They may have ruined my life, but I would accept what was handed me. That was the year I had Barbara Baum for English (I was in low general English, mostly sleeping and would have probably stayed there the rest of my high school years except for Ms. Baum.) She was tall and angular and smoked so her voice was always raspy and she was quite obviously gay, except for the heavy make-up. I think I caught her attention when she asked if anyone had heard of a book by James Joyce called Ulysses. I had and raised my hand. I had gone to the library to find a copy of the Odyssey and picked up Joyce's book by mistake- I still wonder at the fact that Joyce's book was in our high school library. She asked me if I understood it and I told her no. That year I found Sillitoe and Sherwood Anderson and Dylan Thomas because of her and Roger Pfingston, the Journalism teacher. Another teacher, who's name I can't even remember, sort of brownish hair and young and had freckles. (I remember every freckle I ever met.) wanted to start a High School Writer's Workshop. They asked me if there were any more of me around. I rounded up my buddy Jim, who was busy writing a novel and reading Shakespeare behind the books he was supposed to be reading, and Tom who loved SciFi and a couple of others that wrote deep and sorrowful poetry and we started a class. Jim and I were the only ones that finished and actually got school credit for the class. I don't know if it actually helped or not, but it encouraged us to write. And it is a very lonely past time. You have to be willing to sit alone in a room and think of yourself in some kind of manifestation for hours on end.

Mawwiage. And wuv. Twue wuv.

It's been a busy weekend. Took one bear to the airport Saturday morning bright and early and took another yesterday morning bright and early. I picked a lady I met in a Chord Progression Class a week ago and drove her to the Saturday morning Bluegrass Meetup group in Orange County and then brought her back. Had a nice chat. She plays fiddle and mandolin, just relocated from San Francisco for a job here. I'm wondering why on earth anyone would get into a car with a strange guy and ride 50 miles with him when she's just met him. Musicians are a whole 'nother type of people. She was nice, she played the fiddle really well. So I invited her to sit in with the Jug Band on Friday night, warning her that the average age of the group was about sixty.  We just lost our mandolin player. The yoga teacher Sunday morning gave me a Thank You note, cause I guess I may have been the only one in all her classes to give her a little Christmas gift. (Not much really, my book and a recycled gift of hot chocolate which I can't drink) In my youth, I would have probably thought that these women might be interested in me. Now that I'm old and sagging, I think I've turned into the father that everyone wanted.
More than likely both women had hippie fathers and I am certainly that. Same tribes recognize each other easily for some reason.
I was warned at twenty by a shrink I knew well. He said that everyone will be relating to you as if you are a parent, because of the physical differences. The attitude really works quite successfully in a business setting, as long as you don't say it out loud. But it's my fathering skills: make them laugh and then help them do what they want to do.

The reference is from "The Princess Bride" if you haven't seen it. The "good Father" that's performing the marriage has a horrible lisp.

Hadn't Thought About Him For a Long Long Time

Indiana, Monroe County, Bloomington. Indiana University's (IU) Charles "Charley" McDaniel was the 1934 NCAA heavyweight silver medalist, 1935 Big Ten and NCAA champion, and the alternate U.S. 191 pounder at the 1936 Berlin Olympics. The 1932 and 1933 Indiana heavyweight champion while a teammate of Richard Voliva at Bloomington High School, McDaniel lettered in football 1934-35 and 1937, and wrestling 1935-38 (captain 1938) at IU. Head wrestling coach at IU from 1946 - 1971, McDaniel's teams appeared in the NCAA Championships 19 times. He remains the 2nd winningest wrestling in school history and is a member of the IU and National Wrestling Halls of Fame.


He was my first Step-father. He started dating my mother when I was in High School and they were married while I was in Utah during my second year in college. He was the reason I passed Handball my freshman year. I had to retake it because I slept in and didn't make enough classes to finish the first semester. I was working full time at a evening job.. I was having the same problem the second time around, but Charlie saw me playing a match and waited to tell me what I was doing wrong. We were joking around and my teacher saw us and I got a C even though I hadn't been there enough the second time either.


When I quit school after my second year, he offered to get me back into IU even though my grades were terrible. I told him I didn't know what I wanted from school and it seemed a waste of time and money. We respected each other in an odd sort of way. He was the real thing: a jock of the old school. I was this tall hippie who wanted to be Jack Kerouac.


Anyway, he collapsed one day at IU. (This was while I was in Utah.) They rushed him to the hospital, found he had tumors and rushed him to surgery only to find that the cancer had taken over all of his major organs. They sewed him up and sent him home and told him if he was lucky he had a year. He was a big stronger than an ox kind of guy.


He wasted away to nothing. The summer before I hitchhiked off to New Orleans, my mother called and said they were taking him to the hospital. I went to meet them there. He was awake but doubled over in incredible pain. He could no longer talk and was moaning horribly. We took turns and breaks. At one point, I was in the room alone with him and he was sitting up all over again and bending forward in pain and I tried to comfort him and said something about my mother coming back in a second. He told me to leave him alone. It was the last intelligible words he spoke.  


I went and got my mother and he died about fifteen minutes later. I wasn't crying, I felt no grief. I liked the guy. I was sorry, but I was there out of duty to my Mom. My Mom looked at me when he died and cried on Charlie's brother's shoulder.


He was a good guy. I hope no one ever has to go like this again. Now they have pain meds to make it easier. But I honestly believe after seeing this at twenty, that if it comes to me like this, I'm going up in the mountains if I can make it and let myself freeze to death instead.  


  

What Happened Last Night

I went off and played by my own little self last night for the very first time. The banjo came. It was at a open mic night at a place called The Talking Stick in Venice at Lincoln & California. Nice supportive crowd. Lots of musicians of various abilities. I got complements! I did "Pallet On The Floor" a very old song and one that I wrote myself called "We Outgrew It" -about the little house in Venice that we left nearly 15 years ago now.
I guess I did all right. The playing wasn't as smooth because of my nerves, but was ok- or everyone was feeling sorry for me. I don't want to know how I sound at this point. I'll just do it until someone decides to record me. The voice has always been problematic. My speaking voice has that weak-kneed tone to it sometimes that I hate to hear in my brother's voice. I'm sure the singing voice is the same. Me wife says I have a Randy Neuman kind of voice. Whoppee. Anyway, I'm glad they liked it. I'm going back next week. Apparently I'm the only banjo they've had. I have one song that I think will stop the world. It will be interesting to see how it does. I've recycled two of my previously written poems into pretty effective songs. The other two were written from scratch. The words of my songs are twice as good as anything I've heard from the world of open mic songwriters. It's having a product you believe in.

Overgrown Boys In Overgrown Gardens

Spent all day Saturday with a large group of Boy Scouts and their parents redoing an overgrown garden in front of a church in Westchester. One kid's Eagle Project. It looked just as bad as this. The real pictures haven't popped up anywhere as of yet. Some of the adults I've known for 10 years now. The Scout is my daughter's age and went to the same school for a while and road the same bus with her and her two older bears. The kid was tending to be a little heavy, but he found an affection for cross-country so he's lean now. A good guy. He cares about folks. On a camp-out a year ago when I failed to get any of the campers interested in singing along with my banjo, he came over to hang out with me and my son and I ended up giving him an intro lesson in banjo picking.  These Projects a good excuse to get very dirty and a good chance to schmooze with the other parents. I brought my Eagle Scout Bear to show him off and to get myself legitimately lodged in the new adults minds, so they are not wondering why this weird character is helping out with the troop even though his kid is long gone. I'm leading some of them off on a 30 mile bike ride at the end of the month and a 50 mile in March.

Gotta work the crowd.

One of my critics sez I ain't being literary enough and I need to describe my characters. The kid looks like this:

Looking For a New Screen Backdrop Picture

Lawrence Alma Tadema

Every so often, I swap out my computer screen backdrop. This looks really cool on a long wide HD screen (which I have at work). He was a PreRafaelite, did a lot of draped women sitting on marble benches. I been looking at it for a couple of days now, trying to imagine the setting. It looks like a blimp hanger, but for course it couldn't be in a Arcadian setting, so it must the Carthage main artery sewer outlet, a Greek version of the LA River. Or perhaps the ancient equivalent of an freeway tunnel overpass. Notice that the pot looks like its stainless steel. They used to make red beans and rice in a pot like that in Buster Holmes in the French Quarter.

What a wondrous time we live in, to just pull up and play with paintings and find the most obscure pieces that may or may not be reproduced elsewhere or only in an old tome once. We can take the Grand Tour (of Europe- what the rich folks in the 1880s did.) from our desk. There are thousands of things to look at and listen to. When us dreamers were 14, little sci-fi paperbacks and the World Book Encyclopedia and comic books were it for imagining the world. I was lucky to be around an university library. Bound old Life Magazines and LPs in the Public Library was my internet. And Grandparents that kept 50 years of magazines in their basement.

Carnivores- Secret Blog #2

The fictional waif did not straighten up and fly right after landing job and home. He wanted the wild life, he wanted women and intoxication and fell into a herd of similar self-destructive creatures that haunted the French Quarter at night. He ended up in a slave quarter apartment on Decatur and made friends with the drunks in the building: a forty something printer who started on whiskey and milk once he was home, a thirty something ex-cop from Ohio who was going through a bad divorce. They all pretty much hated themselves, but had a warped sense of fun while they were busy killing themselves. The ex-cop brought a guy back to the building that he had met in a bar on Bourbon Street. The guy was a gambler and was following the horses from track to track to around the south. He had grocery bags of money in the back of his station wagon. They all went out to the track with him and bet on what he bet on and they all came back with a couple of hundred in their pockets. They ended up spending most of it the same weekend. There was a lot of coming and going out of that building and strange people coming and going. Our waif took in a girl for a couple of nights that he was sure was a junkie. The ex-cop brought home someone that our waif was sure was really a guy. Something snapped. Perhaps it was the ex-cop coming to the waif one night and asking for his help to run away and join a religious cult. We don't know quite what. But our waif decided he had a yearning for grass and trees. So he found an apartment way far away in the river bend area on Dante Street. He began to write every night at the kitchen table in that little place and kind of gave up his friends in the French Quarter.

But of course, he wasn't done being self destructive.

The Secret Blog#1

Long ago there was a fictional young man that started out from the midwest with a backpack and some money and was going to hitchhike to New Orleans. Along the highway in Mississippi, he fell in with some odd fellows that looked a lot like the creatures that drew Pinocchio astray. Huck Finn also encountered them I think- pretty much in the same part of the river. Our young waif got led astray and spent some time at various places consuming alcohol and other substances and when he finally got to New Orleans his money was gone. He stayed one night in a hotel with a credit card that he could not pay when the bill found him and then found refuge in a shelter on the edge of the French Quarter. And since there was no money, he no longer could be intoxicated. He was not addicted to anything luckily enough. He was lying in the grass, reading Faulkner, one afternoon and an older gentleman stopped to talk to him. The older gentleman had just hitchhiked in from Texas and a bad divorce. He was living under the Canal Street Ferry Wharf. They talked and discovered that they both loved books. The older gentleman had money but wasn't ready yet to decide where to live and what to work at. The older gentleman asked our waif what did he want to do? Our waif thought he might like to be a printer. The older gentleman suggested that under the wharf might a easier place to sleep than in a mission. Our waif wondered how one took a shower and kept clean. The older gentleman showed him how to use public bathrooms and where to find launder mats. Our waif decided that he should find a job. He got all cleaned up and went to look and was hired by the first place he went. The day he got his first paycheck, he moved out of the mission into a very grimy studio-like apartment that smelled of cigars and vomit and urine. He let the older gentleman sleep on his floor and they shared meals for a little while until our waif got paid again.

Then as all things in the Big Easy do, they drifted, the older gentleman found a room, because he only slept a couple of hours a night and it was easier to stay up and read. He had grown up in an orphanage and he hated sharing anything with anyone. He decided he wanted to work in a bookstore, so he started helping out in one until the owner got so guilty that he was hired. Our waif worked at being a printer until he decided he hated it and accidentally got hired by a guy who owned a bookstore- mostly because the guy liked his young body.
It turned out the older gentleman was working for the same guy at a different shop.

We won't describe what really went on in Mississippi or in the Mission. Those things you have to find out for yourself and perhaps you don't want to.

Gospel at the Shelter

Played with Sawtooth (the band built from our Saturday morning group) at the Long Beach Homeless Shelter. We were their after dinner entertainment.

You've not lived until you've sleep in one big room with sixty other men. I wrote about one in Terre Haute here. There was one in New Orleans too. Nothing in the world like standing in line to brush your teeth in the morning.

Got Kate Wolf for Christmas- been playing her a lot.

Sand Hallow State Park

Haven't been here yet. Starting to plan the Grand Canyon trip for early June. The Permit Request has to be FAXed in February 1st. The current plan is to camp on the north rim and go down to the river and turn around and come back out the same way. I had wanted to do a rim to rim trip but it is 200 miles by highway from one rim to the the other which makes for a real problem in leaving a car on both sides. There's a bus that runs daily, but it's $80.00 per person one way. If I have a party of 10, that's a lot of money for folks to spend. From the north, will mean we can camp halfway up coming out so the climb will be easier.  And there will be less tourists like us me thinks.
The drive from LA to the North Rim is a 10 hour drive, so this is where Sand Hallow comes in, its 6-7 hours from LA. This or Vegas? Maybe Vegas would be the place to stop coming home.
I hope the usual crew can make it.

3:00 AM

It's 3 in the morning and I've already been up once and back to bed. We had a wonderful party on the 1st in the afternoon. Music galore and written pieces read aloud. And two of my bears played and sang. And everyone had a great time. I've been over-stimulated. Coming where I came from, you think about things a lot. It was my reaction to the craziness of one parent who had a lot of potential for violence. My writing has come out of that. My brother found Jesus. The brain works and works and spills over. I write novels and paint and write poetry and now write songs to direct it away from these 3 am wanderings. I used to get up and turn the sound off on the TV and make up stories for the images there. I really really hate lying in bed and having my mind churn on endlessly. It doesn't pay and it doesn't solve or fix anything. You get used to the process though. At 58, I know its never going away. I just hope, if my brain starts to shut down in old age, that it leaves with my ability to think, otherwise I will be a lot for someone to handle.
There was a wonderful bit in Proust in the first book about wrapping one's self in ones dreams for that final trip and carrying all of it with you to eternity.
My littlest bear used to have some of over-thought process going on. Hope it's gotten better for her. I'll have to ask her.
Anyway, I have all day tomorrow. Probably skip yoga and take a book to the couch in the sun and pretend to read and snore the afternoon away. In the sun with a book on your chest is the best place in the world to shut it off. The beach is another wonderful place not to think. It may be why I ended up on the coast.
The best place to think is on a bike ride or on a city bus. The mind just wanders in those settings like a concerto in progress. I solve all of my creative work problems on my morning bike ride.

Well, we start again. The mice are actually busy cheerful little things. Just trying to do their job.