When He's Not Blogging

Things I've done in the past couple weeks during my hiatus from daily blogging.

1) Went to a party where I was surrounded by engineers and footwear designers. Everyone (adults--late 20s to 30s) was playing drinking games. It was juvenile and discombobulating and sort of fun. Then I stepped in dog doo and everything changed. There was a guy there who obviously used lots of products (like in his hair, on his face, etc.) wearing a skin-tight black muscle shirt. As far as I know, this is not normal unless it's 1987. He claimed to be a new transplant from New York. Is this acceptable in NY? NYC bloggers weigh in, please.

2) Babysat an obese cat.

3) Watched Tom M. eat the hottest food in the world--"Great Balls of Fire" said the menu. They were a sort of sweet-potato hushpuppy concoction shot through with pure capsaicin. I nibbled a tiny tiny pin-head sized nibble and my whole head (not just my mouth and throat) was on fire for a good fifteen minutes. He ate five of the golf-ball sized things. Truly inspiring.

4) Golfed. Badly.

5) Went on a long quest. What should have been a twenty minute fast-food trip turned into a nearly three hour hunt for the holy grail of crappy Mexican fast food. Tom heard that there was a Del Taco in Vancouver, WA. We couldn't find it. We drove up and down the interstate a dozen times, missing every exit every time. Except the last time. Then we ate. It was as uninspiring as I remember it. But, dammit, they have french fries.

6) Roasted a red bell pepper.

7) Scrubbed my kitchen floor.

8) Attended a Labor Day housewarming cookout sorta thing. Thai chicken and brats. Potato salad with copious amounts of fresh dill. Mini-cheesecake thingies. Deviled Eggs. White cake with chocolate frosting. Lots of Hamms beer.

9) Ran into an old poetry pal from years back, the very very very tall Jay Nebel. On the street. In front of my house. We exchanged numbers.

10) Carried on a poetry-themed correspondence with my ex-ex-ex-girlfriend. The three "ex" only means that it was a long time ago. It was/is pleasant to hear from someone you haven't spoken to in years.

11) Read Jonathan Mayhew's BAP assessment. Agree with most of his ratings, except the Billy Collins one. I mean, come on, Collins isn't very good, but the poem in BAP is very un-Collins like. It's still not very good, but when you give it half the rating of the next worst poem, I can't help but feel that you're reading against Collins, whatever that means. I guess it means that because Collins is a known quantity (i.e. "bad"), he can't receive a rating above a 3/10 even if the poem is better than most of his work. Similarly, I also have the suspicion that ANY Ashbery poem would garner a 9 or 10. I'm not going to bash Ashbery here, and will acknowledge that he's a brilliant poet, and blah blah blah, but come on, the guy's sleepwalking most of the time these days. Or so it seems. The last truly excellent thing he wrote, for my money, is "Girls on the Run."

12) Saw the Pixies in Bend, Oregon. Bend is really weird. In the past ten years it's grown from a tiny central Oregon hamlet into a too-pretty mini-metropolis. Okay, it's still small population-wise, but it's tripled in the past decade. Not only that, but everything is NEW. Buildings and developments and golf courses and tract housing and shopping malls. All very new. It's a strange place. Rumor has it that millionaires from California discovered the area in the early nineties and swarmed in to take advantage of cheap property in a scenic location. In Oregon, when something goes wrong, it's always okay to blame it on the Californians. Anyway, the show: good but predictable. I've seen them three times so far this year, and they're working from a limited setlist. If you see the Pixies three times, you've basically seen the same songs three times, with slight variation. I was disappointed that they didn't play "Winterlong." I arrived late and missed the excellent Decemberists. Saw about half of Death Cab for Cutie. Can someone tell me what's up with this band? They pretty much sucked. But this is coming from a guy who doesn't understand the appeal of Modest Mouse either. Go figure.

13) Ate and drank at a Scottish pub where everything on the menu was either a) sausage, b) deep-fried, or c) deep-fried sausage. Yes, I ate from all three columns. Obesity is my friend.

14) Started a new sequence of poems. The Jane Sonnets. One of them is posted further down on the blog.