air quality today from the smoke of the caldor fire

 

it's friday nite & you want to hear a smooth late summer jam

procrastination

i think nearly all - or indeed all - writers share this trait.  why should it be so?  is it so hard to get to work on the blank page/screen?  yes.  no.  writers, i think, are loners by design.  content to sit, stand or walk alone.  but not lonely.  to notice the minute things of the world.  each little detail of the natural world is so precise & lovely.  to have a pop song move you to tears.  to read a few poems or pages of another writer's work that you find miraculous.  to try to understand an equation & know that there is no way in hell you can solve it without a lot of help.  to use our contemporary technology to watch the International Space Station live feed on YouTube as it orbits the earth.  to point your browser to the website where you can hear - hear! - the wind on mars.  finally, to think how goddamn lucky you are to live in an age that educated you so you can read & write & watch & listen & perhaps have a few thoughts for you are a sentient being who is as confused as everyone else & doesn't know - can't know - what comes next.   

it's saturday nite & you want to see rodney dangerfield recite 'do not go gentle into that good night'

thick smoke from wildfires   orange evening sun   pelicans fish in the surf   one by one   they drop   into the sea   & look like   dinosaurs of the earth

we just returned from our annual holiday at the beach.  still beach-lagged & trying to adjust to real time.  shaking the sand from my hair.  looking at the long end of wearing pants instead of shorts.  i think of something my man thom gunn said, in his autobiographical essay 'my life up to now' [the occasions of poetry: essays in criticism & autobiography (the university of michigan press; 1982)], when speaking of gunn's own holidays taken at The Geysers, in sonoma county, in the early 1970s,

what is the point of  a holiday if we cannot carry it back to our working days?  there is no good reason why that hedonistic and communal love of The Geysers could not be extended into the working life of the towns.  unless it is that human beings contain in their emotions a homeostatic device by which they must defeat themselves just as they are learning their freedom.

gunn approaches his own hedonism & communal love with a steely eye toward the hard fact that human beings will sabotage their own selves.  i've quoted this passage made by one of my favorite poets because i agree with thom gunn.  as i have told anyone within earshot who will listen to the idiocies of an obscure but happy poet - me - that there is no ice cream in heaven.  nor hell.  eat it while you can.

yes we must remain ethical & practice kindness.  having a job might get in the way of the visions of art but working & work life are necessary to keeping our civilization going.  the art of living is another way of practicing that communal love & hedonism into 'the working life of the towns.'

at any rate, i love travel.  i love being at home.  i am pretty good at a mild form of hedonism.  but i am pretty good at defeating myself as i do the things that need to be done without taking any pleasure in them.  i blame myself for it.  because on the surface i am normally cheerful & dumb.  hey!  that would make a nice epitaph!

here lies the poet richard lopez: happy & dumb

put that on my tombstone! 

                                        selfie on the surf