Sunday is my least favorite day of the week. It always has been, and in this town if I go to church, the Cathedral is filled with tourists. It's better to go during the week. Or not go.

I've not felt real well for two days. Like I'm trying to catch a cold or something, and I loathe being sick.

My friends in St. Augustine are all going on vacation. Why now I have no idea, but two are going to Ireland, one to Italy, another to the Virgin Islands. They assured me they'd email me from wherever they are. But I'll be the only one around here that I know. And I don't know myself very well any more. I've changed. I'm much more reclusive, and much nicer to others. I try to spread joy. It doesn't always work. Some people don't want to let joy in their lives. They prefer being miserable. I'm sure of it. Others are addicted to drama, and will not accept the fact that burnt toast is not a major disaster. I want my drama in the movies. Not in my living room, or someone screaming into my ear on the phone.

I think sometime I am far too serious for my own good, however. I went to the library today and was looking through the New Books section and I started bumping into people, and then I went and sat down in a chair, and a man around 50, in bermuda shorts (I had on jeans and a tee shirt and a sweater) tried to start a conversation about was I all right, and what do I like to read, etc. I tried to pretend that I was seriously deranged so he would go away but it didn't work. I thanked him for his concern, and got up and left. Now I'm worrying about him. He was a nice man, most likely a tourist (they always wear shorts, even if it's 50 degrees; those of us who live here have on three layers of clothing) who probably thinks St. Augustine is full of nut jobs. I was reading a review of a book about the life and times of Hunter Thompson (that sure didn't take long -- he just died a few weeks ago) and in the review they listed names of writers who knew how to live when they were young, but could never seem to make the transition to getting old. Scott Fitzgerald, Eugene O'Neill (who died really broke and in debt), Jack Kerouac, etc. Why are there no women in this category? What about Edna St. Vincent Millay? And what does that mean anyway? None of these people died over 70. I don't want to make the transition to getting old either, but I don't seem to have much choice in the matter. I'm not going into a discussion with myself about suicide as an option here, not today. I have known several people go that way. Various reasons, I think. None of the ones that I know had a "mental illness". As far as I know, the authors mentioned were all alcoholic. That's the culprit. Ruins a lot of families. It is the only "disease" I know of that you go out and buy.
I'm sick of the whole debate.

I think I'll go read for a while.

Ciao




 

I remember when Friday night was a big deal. High school football games, hayrides, sledding in the snow, etc. Now, I'm glued to my PC. In case something happens. Ha!

Today A member of our little community asked me why I write publically. I didn't quite know what to say. I said to keep from going totally insane. That was my answer. For you wonderful people who leave me comments, why do you write?

Meanwhile, I've written two Rondolets for a contest, and AL reviewed one of them. Then she went on to her theory of aesthetics. I want to share this with you (without her permission)! "To analyze poetry is really futile, it's the same as analyzing visual art. Poetry and paintings come from the soul of the artist, and speak to the souls of the beholders in the way they behold them."

WOW! I was impressed, and still am. She has a very valid point. So why then do we have critics, and people who analyze paintings, photographs, poems, etc. for a living. They write books about these items, and sell them. Big bucks in that field. I think it was the poet Archibald McLiesh (or McLeish) that said "A poem should not mean, but be." It folows, then, that the poem does not necessarily mean anything unless it means something to the person who is reading it. There is a contact made, between souls. We all know that a poem can mean one thing to one person and another thing to another, depending on where the reader is coming from. I like poetry that transports me to another realm of being, a different zone, into the ethereal world.

I love what I see as beautiful, but some would say that all things are beautiful if you see them correctly. This is a very difficult thing for me, but I am sure it's true. I'm sure a live heart about to be transplanted into another person's body looks beautiful to the surgeon, the surgical nurses, and would look good to the receiver if he were awake. I think Detroit, Michigan looks good to Henry Ford's heirs, and I find it one of the most unpleasant cities I have ever been in. Americans and Western Europeans seem to find great beauty in naked men and women performing various variations of the act of love. Pornography is big business. I've heard it's 65% of the money made on the Net. But, in Islamic countries, women stay covered up. I doubt if they have nude beaches in India or Sri Lanka. Well...maybe Sri Lanka. For the tourists. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder all right. So why all this criticism? I'm not talking about Writing.com, because we are trying to help each other, which is different from a professor who publishes a book explaining what, say, Picasso's paintings mean. How did all this come to be? When did it start, and why? There has not always been a Book Review Section in the New York Times or the Times Literary Supplement. Why do we need others to tell us what to like and not like?

I gotta think about this.

Ciao




 

It's 7 p.m. DST. I don't know how that turns into Greenwich Mean Time. Nor do I know how to find out. Since I go to bed at 3 or 4, nap or no nap, it's early yet. It's also going down to 43 tonight, after being in the high 70s earlier in the week. I always have to get the weather report in.

Three car bombs in Iraq today. Yeah, things are doing well over there all right. We sure did make the world a lot safer, George. That's what he said, I saw him (whoops, another "slip" on breaking my TV addiction) or I'd not believe it. I still don't quite understand why suicide bombers are "cowardly". Were Kamakazi pilots cowardly? Or is it just the Arabs and Middle Easterners. It seems to me that takes either a large desire to die, or a total belief in what one is doing for one's country, or else some kind of insanity that they haven't named yet (no, it's different from suicide). Wham-drive that plane right into that tall building. Boom-blow up myself and all those around me. Just for sport. Sounds like the lions and the Christians. (If the Christians get a capital C why don't the lions get a capital L?) Somebody is always getting discriminated against. Silly grammar rules.

I spent hours on a poem I started last night, and I finally thought, there, I've got it! I put it on word, printed it, and don't like it at all. The whole day ~ poof! Gone. My head started hurting, I started freezing, I had all these phycosomatic reactions until I banged myself on the cupboard door in the kitchen (unintentionally) and then I felt better. The pain and blurryness took my mind off the bad poem.

I may have to take a hatchet to the TV. I think I can borrow one from the guy who lives across the street. Speaking of Afghanistan, which I was earlier when I recommended Rumi to a new member, Eric (the guy across the street) was there two years. He said "Don't go there. It's very dangerous." He looked at me with a straight face and said that. If I lived in a peaceful country, like Switzerland or Sweden, would I have to listen to this empire building the USA is doing? I'll give up my citizenship, my TV, even my pseudo-tan (I'm a light white redhead), anything but my Internet connection, to not have to listen to this every blankin' day. Let alone the people who think Bush is great. Those I can walk away from easier than I can push the off button. Why is that?

I was walking around my house (apartment, room, depending on my mood) and I looked out the screened in porch door and this bird was just sitting there staring at me. I opened the sliding glass door and the bird did not move an inch, and or an eyeball, and just kept staring at me. I ask it if it wanted to come in, or if it was hungry, and it just stared at me. I'm sure it was some kind of shorebird, but then I went outdoors to try to discern what its problem was, but it flew off into the tree to my upperleft. I put out some breadcrumbs, and see now that most of them are gone. Probably those Starlings got them....grrrrrr. I take this as some kind of sign. Definitely.

A leoparard in Nevada bit it's trainer's middle finger off a few months ago. In San Jose, California a customer in a restaurant found a fingertip in his chili. Guess what? They're a match! It went through the leopard in Nevada (to put it politely) and from there ended up in a bowl of chili in San Jose. I don't know if it was meatless chili or not, but I know someone is going to get a lot of money. Why don't body parts turn up in my food when I eat out? If they did I'd probably eat out more often. I'd probably have a new lap top too, with Paint Shop Pro 9 installed in the factory and a young graphics person to show me how to use it.

Did anybody win the raffle? The ticket buying ad is gone, and I think the winners will be announced tomorrow. I hope somebody I know wins this time. Like me.

I'm getting so old I don't even know who the celebs are who are getting arrested for drunk driving or possession, or who are entering rehab. Where did these people come from when I wasn't looking. I wasn't overseas that long. Or that recently. I'm about to go again, except now the airlines today ruled (or the government ruled, I don't know which) that you cannot even take a cigarette lighter on an airplane. You can take that matches.

Remember Richard Reid, the shoe bomber? He was sitting in his seat on an airplane when an alert stewardess noticed he was trying to light his shoe with a match. She immediately called the on-plane police. I think all American airplaces (maybe all airplanes everywhere) have police in them now, and all the doors to the pilots are made of thick, think steel. I don't know because I won't fly until they stop this, which doesn't look like it'll be very soon. I guess I'll have to cross the pond, as we say, in an ocean liner. Big bucks AL, even if they make absinthe legal there, don't count on my showing up for a while, okay? I bet that's a relief.


 

Nope, no writing again today, except emails, and my "To Do"
list is getting longer. Now there's a Rondelet on it. Plus this and that. I think I'll disconnect the phones and the door bell and then I'll either go completely nuts because it's so quiet, and nobody loves me, etc., or I'll get some SERIOUS writing done. Time for drastic measures. Spring brings out the bounce in people, including me. I just bounce right over to the beach, boing boing boing ~
splash!!!

I saw Jane Fonda on TV last night, after I said I was going to not watch TV for one week. She is 67. I should have looked so good at 37! She says no bo-tox, no face lifts, tummy tucks, etc. Just good food, exercise and good husbands. She praised Ted Turner a lot.

Moving right along, the insurgents or the resistance or somebody in ski masks with huge guns captured an American contractor in Iraq yesterday. He was shown holding up a picture of his family, and some sort of ID. The capturers said if the United States does not get out of Iraq, they are going to kill his man. Condi said our policy is not to negotiate with terrorists. Place your bets right here, ladies and gentlement, all bets taken. Odds are now 10 to 1
he's dead by the week's end.

Meanwhile my son's apartment caught on fire, and he lost everything, but he's alive and well, and almost sounds like he's enjoying it. When he was about four he had the chicken pox, and I was working. My friend Karen took care of him for me during the day. I remember her commenting "He sure is a stoic little guy." Well now he's a stoic big guy (6'3") and is doing volunteer work while his apartment gets rebuilt. I'd by hysterical if I were him. I got hysterical (well, almost) when he was telling me about it. He's in Texas. I'm in Florida. My poor baby boy. Yeah, yeah, I know. He's a grown man. There's something terribly wrong with this whole system. What if Eve had not eaten the apple? Would we all not be here?

The Bible starts out "In the beginning..." I want to know what happened before the beginning. This has ofen puzzled me and given me great occasion to ponder. I am very good at pondering. It's one of the activites I do best.

A nice lady, who I barely know really, brought me a beautiful orchid today. I've a green thumb. I can grow big fica trees from little fica branches and interweave the trunk, and the in a few years sell them to the nurseries for big bucks! It's a cottage industry for me. I wonder if people have condo industries, since there aren't any cottages left in the United States.

Walmarts is in so much trouble that they are attempting to re-establish their good name by buying land equal to the land they have destroyed with ugly buildings and huge parking lots; this new acquisition will then be given to the Fish and Wildlife something or other. But those eyesores are still all over. I don't think they're going about this right, but they didn't ask me. Besides, I don't care if they go out of business. I can't stand to go there anyway.

Hummm, I wonder who's on line.
 

Tuesday was a strange day. Slept late, which always makes everything late the rest of the day. Then I got in an awful mood over nothing, just nothing, but WDC friends skyisfalling02 and AL got me out of it. Sky is really getting great with pics and Paint Shop Pro. I want one! - Paint Shop Pro; she sent pics.

Not much happened in the world either. They have upped
security around certain buildings. Then they'll take it down again. Hillary's going to be President, everyone seems to agree. That'll be fun. The first woman president. You heard it here first!

My South Beach Diet is working just great. So is my
Abs Lounge, except I overdid it yesterday. Stayed off of it today. I'm gonna have washboard abs before I die! Whoo-whee!

Just read almost 80 short stories as a judge in a contest on here. Whew. It's not an easy thing to do, write a good short story. Out of 80, maybe 10 or 12 were really good. Those are not good odds. I'm trying to write a good one , but I just can't quite get it. There's something I'm missing. I read an interview with a new short story writer who has 1 book of short stories out and another on the way soon; she said she write over 3,000 short stories before she wrote the one that got published. She's hitting the coveted markets though...The New Yorker, etc. Is there an etc. after The New Yorker?

I wonder how many people on here have a day job. That would make a good poll. Think I'll set that up.

Oh, I also wanted to note here I've titles for two books (novels) -- this is after I perfect the short story -- (1) Grave Paradise, a novel about Florida in the 21st century and (2) Pine Barrens.
about the doings in the South Jersey. Also want to do the Zen-Catholic comparison (they're very close). Like I say, this is after by 4,000th short story. That should all take up the rest of my life. At least won't be bored in my old age. Lotta people are. I have never been able to understand that. How does one go about being bored? I get bored with situations, or people or places, or things, but not bored as in "I don't know what to do" or "I don't have anything to do". There's really so much to do, as long as you are healthy.

There's an 80-year-old surfer in St. Augustine. He's
everybody's idol. Comes in first in the senior division every year. He is an inspiration. Hope the sharks don't get him.