can i confess how packed with stuff this week's been?  perhaps i don't have to.  i am a full time dad, husband, worker bee and poet.  the order of that isn't important for these parts of my being are all important.  can one divide the self into autonomous selves?  i suspect most of try for the face i present at work is not always the face i have when i am home or the face i use when i read/write.  all are my authentic selves.  the koan, 'what is yr original face before yr parents were born?' factors into it.

well but so i spent a couple days in the bay area with anna.  anna's business.  i was happy to have a couple of hrs with anna when she wasn't on the clock.  but i managed to tear away for a few hrs in berkeley yesterday haunting a couple of bookstores and a record store.  but bay area traffic?  fuck it!  gawd traffic's awful.  how do people who live in the bay area cope?  i mean the thousands and thousands and thousands of vehicles on the roads and freeways is loco.  s.f. is now one of the tech mega cities on earth.  wouldn't all those tech workers demand the right to telework, and so avoid, or help ease, the congested freeways and streets?!

okay then i spent a couple hrs at the greatest bookstore in the world, moe's.  i bought a stack of books this high.  one of those books is a short novel by the poet owen hill.  i like hill's work.  i have one of his chapbooks published by blue press.  i know he's a bay area poet.  but when i took my stack to the counter the guy ringing me up looks at hill's book and turns to his co-horts and says, 'hill manages to sell a book and he's not here!'  what?  'hill works here.  has been working here for 20 plus years.'  coincidences.  okay.  'he coulda signed it for you.'  just tell owen that i dig his work.  and i do.  i read the book today and fell in love with the poet-p.i. clay blackburn.  blackburn reminded me of TV p.i. jim rockford if rockford was a bisexual small press poet.  i understand hill has more books in this series.  they are that delicious.

weather was fantastic in the bay area.  i love berkeley.  other than sac berkeley is my favorite town.  big but small and quite funky.  i spent a while walking thru the neighborhoods around telegraph admiring the weathered victorian and stuccoed houses.  the neighborhoods reminded me a bit of my own neighborhood if a little more funkified.  but one thing i always wondered, here in my own burg and in berkeley yesterday: i have the day off work so it's kinda like a mini-vacation, but when i am home on a weekday so it seems everyone else is home.  in berkeley the streets were thick with people of all shapes and ages.  what up?  everyone else on vacation too?

or perhaps my compatriots have found that balance of bohemia and domesticity that clay blackburn discovered that could support a house?  i haven't the foggiest.  or they could be thinking the same of me.  what is this tall grey-haired man doing haunting bookstores on a wednesday morning when he should be at work.  my neighbors may be thinking, i took the day off and that doofus down the street is outside mowing his lawn?!

ce'st la vie.