I like these breaks when all the students are gone and the college campus is quiet and deserted. The lights in the commons building are out and the classrooms are locked. No heavy, comforting library is available for reading or visiting, no regular meals or milling flocks of students. Maybe you feel a little less taken care of, but the beauty and fun of the campus is still open...like slipping into forbidden places and staying up all night in the summer. And trowing things at the head prefect from the roof of the commons...

I'm drawing again. Just this morning, for the first time in weeks. I like it. It's good. There such a gleeful satisfation in being creative, it's strange...

Well, it is another bright morning in the mountains of Southern California. The wind is blowing gently and I am wishing I could leave for walk. Hopefully the day will go quickly and I can take a nap this afternoon...I am so tired...

So I ordered a CD from a music store in Portland and this is the message they sent me:

Your CD has been gently taken from our CD Baby shelves with
sterilized contamination-free gloves and placed onto a satin pillow.

A team of 50 employees inspected your CD and polished it to make sure
it was in the best possible condition before mailing.

Our packing specialist from Japan lit a candle and a hush fell over
the crowd as he put your CD into the finest gold-lined box that money
can buy.

We all had a wonderful celebration afterwards and the whole party
marched down the street to the post office where the entire town of
Portland waved "Bon Voyage!" to your package, on its way to you, in
our private CD Baby jet on this day, Tuesday, March 13th.

I hope you had a wonderful time shopping at CD Baby. We sure did. Your picture is on our wall as "Customer of the Year." We're all
exhausted but can't wait for you to come back to CDBABY.COM!!

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

Sigh...

Rather funny, but in a shaky, scary way, like when someone is describing in detail how they could kill the person next to you. Just goes to show once again that Portland Oregon is one if the weirdest cities around. The CD I bought is awesome though, you should check them out. They call themselves the Weepies, and they are about as Indy as you can get. An odd mix of gentle pop and folk with that element that is beginning to define contemporary underground music---a woman lead singer with a very strange and different but beautiful, voice backed by a warbling male.

It is so nice to wake to the sun shinning every morning. You wouldn't think that grey skies and rain day after day could depress you beyond your control, but they really can. California is such a beautiful place...(if you stay near the coast and out of the cities..!)

The newest version of Microsoft IE makes my blog look terrible. Firefox won't show it correctly either. And since I have not had internet access at home or anywhere that I can stay a long time, I have done nothing about this. (At least, that is the protest of guilt). Then again, I have neglected this blog miserably for close to a year. Well, my excuse is that I want to start posting artwork again, but I guess that means I would have to draw something. Oh yeah, I want to put poetry on it again too, but I haven't written any lately. I think it's a mental block...or just me.

I bought a book today. Sailing Alone Around the Room by Billy Collins, the U.S. Poet Laureate til '03. I have wanted to read it for quite a while, and so on a lonely sunny Sunday I snagged it from a Barnes and Noble shelf. (The only reason I was there is that I wanted a good cup of Joe, and it can be a challenge to find such a thing in semi-rural SoCal). I picked up some new music too, I'll give you the review after I have listened a bit more. Life back at TAC is good and relaxing, but without the Little Palindrome I feel a sad...

Working on a wine label for a friend tonight, and maybe later some poetry. Inspiration has been a long time coming...

Have you seen this yet?

Grey morning of weeping sky
After a cold bed, an empty room
Driving in the rain
Driving in the dark
Squint at the oncoming headlights
I saw a 45MPH sign and I wanted to keep going...
Keep driving through the dark and the cold and the wet
Forever perhaps
Everything is muted earth
Rivulets spill down tree trunks
And wind through the muddy driveway
It is winter
The quiet is me...

In two weeks I will be moving once again. Back to California where the nights are warm and the sky is always blue and the sun heats your bones. Not quite eight months in Oregon, that mystical place of hipsters and coffee houses, artists and rain; and all is changing again. I'll be sad to go (who isn't sad when they have to leave a place?), but the call of the southern coast and the prospect of a job I know I enjoy have tipped the scales. The world is open and beckoning, and adventures are as close as you make them. Been listening to the Kings of Convenience, a jazzy band from Norway who sound like Simon and Garfunkel, and Joanna Newsom, and trying to get a solid 8 hours a night. And I see the shape of a quiet future forming in the June Gloom over the sea.

I discovered this post in my drafts that I guess I never published. It was written while working at Kinko's in Ventura...I find it rather silly. I am very long ways from that time, but somehow it was only yesterday...

Careening carelessly along Monday morning freeways, bleary-eyed and happy at the prospect of coveted sleep...A forlorn Lucky smolders merrily between my lips as I smash the accelerator toward the dark, secret places under the dash in the Travelette. Did you know that a 1968 full-size truck will do 80mph in second gear? I love Internationals. Tired enough to feel very, very happy, and want to stay up forever...I admit I curled up behind a printer for about an hour and a half while Sweet-Cheeks (dont' ask, he's a Catholic) kept watch for the Melting Snowman who always shows up to work at 5:20am. Now that's absurd. So why am blogging right now instead of sleeping?

Today is very quiet and grey. Portland is a mysterious and melancholy place sometimes, filled with thoughtful clouds and plaintive raindrops. Everone here is hip but rootless, cool and interesting but strangely hopeless. Young and beautiful but losing that fragile grip of moral peace. I talked late into the night with my roommate Charles, musing over beers and guitar strings about childhood, vocations, loneliness and the basic human need to belong to somthing or someplace. Our generation is as rootless, restless and as lost as any has ever been it seems; we have no hometowns, no secure jobs, no clear vision of a future that includes anyting familiar. We cling to our scattered friends and memories, desparate for stabilty, left in the end with simply God and Hope and our own independence to get us by. Not that this is the worst situation we could be in...there is pride and trust that binds us in our travels and chance wanderings, like Dylan, Guthrie, Kerouac, Croce, G. Welch, and the rest, past and present. Folk music and thrift clothing, battered old cars and guitars remind us that we are truely American, for this is the American way---not those mid-century men devoid of passion and identity, with thier breadbox homes and corporate jobs, living without a face, no---Americans rode West and lived or died on their wagons, hopped trains or walked because there is dignity in the search for work, not in deflated, broken soup lines, hitchhiked and picked fruit so they could least say they were taking care of themselves. Independence is the core of the America soul, and it is a proud but lonely place. And now that I am a little older and soon to be married, community, Catholic community especially, is paramount. I think there will always be occasional times of loneliness and isolation, but I hope that my (soon to be) wife and I will be something steady, an island for each other and those we meet. It's okay to be lonely or moved by the various tragedies in life, but if relationships with God and loved ones, and charity for everyone we encounter are nurtured and culivated, nothing will be important in the end except perserverance in love and the peace Christ may spread through us.
There is no stopping my deep passion for so much of the music that is tied to the ragged youth of our times though...for all you who have loved Gillian Welch, Dylan or the Be Good Tanyas, I have a new artist for you: I randomly aquired this CD from an elf-shaped girl at a coffee house near where Anna lives; we asked her who was on the stereo and she gave us Joanna Newsom. If have not heard her yet you MUST. A funky, folky, harp-player from a NorCal mountain town with a bizarre voice and lovely melodies...click on her picture and listen to the music video on her website, she's quite something.

I stumbed across this little blurb on Wikipedia today while browsing the web in a coffee house in Portland. This spring I have left a short-lived romance with cigarettes behind me, but this still tickled me. In 1604, King James the 1st put forth this entertaining but rather compelling anti-smoking statement, (remember, this was before the invention of proper cigarettes):

Have you not reason then to bee ashamed, and to forbeare this filthie noveltie, so basely grounded, so foolishly received and so grossely mistaken in the right use thereof? In your abuse thereof sinning against God, harming your selves both in persons and goods, and raking also thereby the marks and notes of vanitie upon you: by the custome thereof making your selves to be wondered at by all forraine civil Nations, and by all strangers that come among you, to be scorned and contemned. A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the Nose, harmefull to the brain, dangerous to the Lungs, and in the blacke stinking fume thereof, neerest resembling the horrible Stigian smoke of the pit that is bottomelesse.

The last sentence is the best!