spanish weekend

i'm offline like since thursday night and whoa! i see that otoliths #14 is live and as always mark young makes for an excellent editor as well as poet. clicking thru very quickly there's much to admire but for the moment i'll point out daniel f bradley's visual poems white whitch 1 & 2 which i dunno just knock me out, and nicholas michael ravnikar's pieces that i think achieve i kind of tonal and visual grace that recalls some of the distortion and feedback of sonic youth as they expand and recreate the structure of the pop song. i recalled a few pieces by ravnikar that i read some years ago in the columbia poetry journal that i liked. i think there's a few younger poets writing this sort of hyper-extended lyric that recalls the dissonance of langpo while retaining lyric sensibilities. that's how i read it anyway. there's another younger poet i think quite good writing in this vain too, ryan philip kulefsky, that i google every now and then.

it's not like i'm disenchanted or nothing. i stayed away from poetry over the weekend, with one exception, i exchanged chaps with noah falck last week and his chap life as a crossword puzzle arrived on friday. i'll write about it later but i read the chap with admiration and delight as nicholas splashed in the tub and i put down the my-life-as-the-son-of-a-fucked-up-set-of-parents memoir that i'm currently reading. are all memoirs about anything but being fucked up? c'mon, give me a break now. i suppose steadyness and sobriety are boring reads but in order to write one must indeed be steady and at least possess a modicum of sober otherwise what gets written is gibberish. ah, but we all must have our mornings of drunkenness now don't we. i'm guilty as charged too. hence, my reason for reading the memoir, because i've got a soft spot for louts as well. maybe it's like looking in a mirror.

be that as it may, we spent the weekend doing family things, including cleaning the house and tidying up the garden. the weather couldn't be nicer, almost like fall, which is, again, my favorite time of year. but for the hottest parts of the day we took long siestas and did our work in the late afternoon and evening. nothing, i mean nothing, feels more luxurious and refreshing than long naps in the middle of the day. dinnertime was late, around 9:30 pm, and if that ain't too much information, and i suppose it is, the weekend lent itself to a grace and civility that is sometimes sorely lacking.

such was our spanish weekend. it began by my taking nicholas to the drive-in, just me and him. the place is great with bounce houses for the children located by the snack bar. there is a bit of seediness to the place, it is a drive-in after all, still a bit run down and the menu boards at the snack bar are hand-painted and the movie posters are framed in broken sills. even with all that i call it a family-style atmosphere. we loved it, both nicholas and i, but boy am i feeling old. my eyes are worn-out you see. even with my glasses reading small print is getting harder to do but reading signs from a distance, such as road signs is damn near impossible too. it was dusk when we arrived at the drive-in. there are 6 movie screens but only two kiosks to purchase your admission. the 2 lines became very long and i couldn't read the signs for what movie was for what kiosk. i needed binoculars, i swear. squinting didn't help either. so i asked the suv in the next line what the signs said. they give me this look and i tell them i can't read them at all. then very kindly and very patiently the ticked the movies off then asked if i need to be in their line. i said no thank you, i am in the right line, as i sat scratching my head and stared down the long line toward what maybe the onset of what i dunno old-timer's disease as i stretch out for that big cane and a hitch in my step and call everyone i meet young whippersnappers. oh lord. time for a nap.