wasted moonlight

i have simply been too busy these days. it sounds cliche this time of year but true. i wish to just sit for a while.

"i've wasted too much moonlight.
breast-beating. I'll waste no more moonlight,
the moon bullied by clouds drifts west
in her imponderable arc, snared for a half
hour among the wet leaves in the birdbath."

~jim harrison

hot as fuck.

sunday morning. the sky is gray and the hills filled with fog. i can see the sun trying to break through, but the clouds are relentless. the say to the sun, "it is sunday, go back to bed and sleep a bit longer." but i am up with the sun. i sat in my bed this morning reading, as its light broke the sky. light which is quite hot.

some facts: Scientists conclude that the average temperature of the sun’s outer layer {the photosphere} is around 6,000 degrees Celsius. The next layer {called the convection zone} is approximately 60,000 miles thick and reaches temperatures of around 5 million degrees Celsius. The sun’s core, somehow for the love of god, reaches temperatures in excess of 15,000,000 degrees Celsius. Hot as fuck one might say.

thankful to live so far away.

coltrane only got in 16

i am ill. recording my voice last night, became an impossible task as it was tending to come and go, come and go. frustrating, as i am two songs away from being 100% finished with "i am not in spain." i am still so in love with this record, and so hungry to have it finished. today, i will call the mastering engineer we desire to discuss an appointment. and then perhaps i will lie around doing nothing. it is amazing how quickly our drive leaves with our health. today, i wish to do little more than lie on my couch and read. sleep. but there is so much to be done. like work on the new website. send off more letters. do my laundry. revise lyrics.

tonight my father comes down and we will spend the evening together. i will take my cold medicine to blur my senses, and we will hit the night. dinner and charlie hunter. perhaps this time, i will figure out how charlie plays that fucking thing, which is incomprehensible to me. there was a time where off and on for years i spent about 7 or 8 hours a day practicing guitar, and i figured i'd need about 37 a day to make sense of what he was doing. coltrane only got in sixteen. lazy ass.

but then i also concluded at some point that i had no interest in playing jazz, that only my ego wanted that. so my energy and time spent shifted. life is like that. we change our minds now and then.

work less

this morning, mike calls to express his sadness in having to work today, while yesterday he had the freedom to do whatever he wished. i then sat on my couch drinking tea, and stumbled across the following passage in adbusters.

i want to consider the possibility that every age has an extremely small fraction of people who go their own way without making a big production of it: not Jean-Paul Sartre, but Boris Vian; not Goethe, but Heinrich von Kliest; not Martin Heidegger, but Ludwig Wittgenstein. these are bohemians with a small b, in other words; their work breaks with fixed forms, and it is often about the idea of breaking with fixed forms. yet they do not try to elevate their iconoclasm into a movement, a new fixed form. In his book Class, Paul Fussell calls this group "class X," but since this group, for the most part, has very little in common with Generation X, I am going to substitute the acronym NMI, the new monastic individual. NMIs, says Fussell, make up the class of people that belong to no class, have no membership in a heirarchy. they form a kind of "unmonied aristocracy," free of bosses, supervision, and what is typically called "work." they work very hard, in fact, but as they love their work and do it for its intrinsic interest, this work is not much different from play. in the context of contemporary american culture, such people are an anomaly, for they have no interest in the world of business success and mass consumerism. their credo, if it could be formulated at all, most clearly approximates a haiku by the seventeenth-century Japanese poet Basho:

Journeying through the world
to and fro, to and fro
cultivating a small field.

perhaps it is time to "work" less.

yes

today i am reminded of an old quote from Rilke that goes something like this: "you must ask yourself in the stillest moment of your night, if it were denied you to create, would you die? and if the answer is yes, then you have no choice. if your answer is no, then please go do something else."

30 to 31

on wednesday i jumped from 30 to 31. i haven't yet decided just how i feel about moving into the house of my thirties. before, it was just a home with blank walls and bare floors, but now there are memories. art that hangs, and stains beneath me from the first year lived in this decade of mine. last year just before or after my birthday {i can't recall which} i found a hair growing in my ear. good god, i thought they didn't grow there until one was in their sixties. i stood before the mirror laughing at my attempts to tame this process of aging.

and this year my goals are much of the same, as life tends to be. finish those two unfinished records, and before 32 rolls around, make a third. if only these things could be made overnight, i wouldn't wish to run off with the next before the one presently at hand is finished. go for more walks. eat more carrots. why don't i buy them more often at the store? ride my bike to maine. learn how to better immitate an irish accent. practice more flamenco. and so forth. such nostalgia lives in the quiet hands of these birthdays we have. hands that caress and strangle us both. i suppose more than anything else it is yet another marker of time, that beast that we so feebly attempt to seduce. at the moment, she sleeps peacefully by my side listening to the rain with me. but who knows about tomorrow?

AIDS day

Today is world AIDS day.