From the big writing desk at the center of the universe

When our television commercials are unearthed they will show, providing the technology still exists to display them, a happy, smiling, prosperous people floating thru the noosphere, having once suffered from some dread or imagined disease and then taking Broccolio or Pernesto or Gregaria or some other miracle pharmeceutical, finally free to drift merrily from prescription to prescription, addicted to almost everything, especially dystopianism. And so Baumont’s ‘liquid modernity’ unspools in real time, a continuous loop of 30 and 60 second tv spots paid for by corporations in order to prop up evening news broadcasts from trusted sources.

“So,” someone dear to me asked late the other night, “what would you take if you had to evacuate the house in an emergency?”

“Contact lens solution, and a small hand-held mirror.”

This morning, 9/15/20, the skies in the national forest of San Francisco are still smoky with an admixture of fog, sirens, and foghorns. There’s some sort of little insect—a fruit fly perhaps—in my studio. He or she seems to need to be my friend. The painting I’m working on at the moment wants words, wants the actual color to say “red” or “black” or “green…” I have to speak with my painting, make sure that it understands that I don’t know what I’m doing.

Painting is the easiest of the arts, writing is the most difficult, and music is undefinable, hence its grace.

If Cervantes (Rabelais, Sterne et.al) had a word processor Don Quixote would never have been written. I can’t prove this of course but I’m almost certain of its truth.

The rejection notice from The New Yorker keeps showing up on my laptop screen. I write my own rejection notice: Dear___________________, this is why my poem won’t work for your magazine (journal, quarterly, semi-annual anthology, prestigious poetry award competition, writer’s colony, poetry workshop etc)—IT ISN’T A POEM! I thought it was a poem, it was a poem when I sent it to you, several friends, poets and non-poets assured me it was a poem, it was a poem once-upon-a-time, but something happened, I’m not sure what, but something.

When I wake up now and pull the curtains open I expect to see ruins, for what else could I see?