From a Cabin in Wyoming

Our nation could become genius again and not so much demand freedom, only having an inkling at this point of what freedom is and isn’t, and instead dispatch an experimental search party, comprised of brave people on The Right and Left dedicated to the idea that political power belongs to The People, to go and get it.

I’m now filled with hope, having never seen in my lifetime such an outpouring of good thinking and writing on the state we find ourselves in. Such is the ‘state’ that all the big print media outlets—The NYT, the LAT et.al.—are now offering ‘Poem(s) For A Day’, and have been since 2016, the year of our rebirth as a nation. And then to read the long-form prose the other morning by Rebecca Traister in the on-line edition of Portside (“The Birth of an Extraordinary Progressive Movement”) kicked my hope a notch higher…

…it’s cold here. The first night in the cabin we lost electricity, which created the dreaded domino effect: no electricity, no heat and no hot water. This amid an unexpected freeze and an overnight 8-inch snow dump.. There was kindling and cut wood under the porch to bring in and make a fire, and propane in the tank to boil water for hot tea; we survived, the “happy genius of our household,” to paraphrase WC Williams.

Time can be so oppressive, no matter what time it is or what time you’re in (2016-2020). At the moment I’m in Wyoming, trying to write a brand-new book. I’m making paintings too, in a place where I have all the time in the world. I make lots of mistakes as a writer, so many mistakes that there are many times when I don’t think of myself as a writer at all. I know I’m not a painter, yet I paint as if I can’t make a mistake, that any mistakes I might make are what were meant to be in the painting anyway, a very real part of the whole.

I’m no genius, neither are you, but we might be geniuses together, should we continue to explore the collective possibilities of this nation of genius, having proved we survived its worst moments.

GRILLED CHEESE IS ON SABBITICAL BEGINNING NOV. 3, 2020. The CHEESE WILL RESUME JANUARY, 2021, SHARPER THAN EVER, WE HOPE!