I didn't tell you yesterday I was so busy writing about the night before (really, Danny, was all that garbage only about Friday night? [no, Mikey, it was also about Sharkey.toes and other shits that flop around in the river] oh shut up Dano it's getting old already)
I will never forgive him (I lie, I must for my own selfish soul sake) for pasting Aida's picture (maybe forgive but never forget or think of him pleasantly again [too bad as if he cares what I care] no not) pasted her pretty smiling face onto the south end of a cow headed north
— it wasn't a cow
all right, a woman who looks fatter than we are
— yeah about five times a hundred more
yo defiendo mi peso como un perro
— do you want that with pepperoni or just hawaiian pig
now you shut up
Where was I?
— What you didn't tell us yesterday because you were talking about the night before.
Oh yeah. I went walking yesterday down past Fine Arts Boulevard to
a Saturday street market and there I found a book about Marlene Dietrich— Reading it now.
Talk about our late great 20th century.
Yes. Except she was contracted at Paramount.
x reminded you of your late cousin Dolores who danced
for Carole Lombard in Hollywood and again on the wings
Flying Down to Rio with Fred Astaire and how that has led you
to create the fantasy wing of your fictional family history in
California shadows and the mythical city of San Miguely yet it all comes out in the end there is no fiction there is not truth only indented paragraphs
z and the damn computer buzzing trying to access the floppy drive you think it's been infected with some kind of trojan worm that keeps trying to get back to its source where you picked it up in the cafe but your machine at home is a virgin, unconnected and
w ell well one of these days you'll have to buy a new one, Danial
A Amen
— You were also ragging about your new resolution, Danial.
Oh yeah. To only write and revise everything on the day of the date of the entry.
I already had a problem with that just now I wanted to go back and revise what I wrote yesterday but
I didn't. Not even the typographical error.— Hey, Dano, there's more than one typo there.
Whatever.
— Maybe you should.
No.
— ?
Well maybe.
— Yeah, you did say you wouldn't, except where "absolutely necessary" eh?
YEAH... and who's to say what's absolutely necessary?
— why, WE are, of course, you and me, the left and write hands, brains, feet
It is amazing to be able to publish on line, and then go back anytime and edit, revise, etc. This ain't no frozen paper book. Sadly, it ain't as sweet as a paper book, either. One of my 2007 resolutions is to publish more paper books, including, especially, at least one that someone ELSE will publish for me, choosing my work as worthy.
(Ahem: ego).
I was a child of the 20th century. Now I am getting used to be an old man of the 21st. Break the rules of grammar Moses for the third millennium. My grandparents meanwhile were some of the last children of the 19th. In all honesty, I suppose they really were grandchildren of the 19th, not children, as they lived far into the 20th, 50, 60, 80 years, and were adults then and there both big wars for the greater part of their lives, indeed, I feel certain my grandparents would have laughed if they knew I would grow old and call them children of the 19th century, no, no, they would say, you are talking about our parents and grandparents, not us, we were all young when the centuries turned into twenty.
But ah, my dear ones, I would answer, you were born in the 19th. You became adults, and parents, in the 20th. You crossed the bridge. Grandchildren of the 19th, you came of age into the 20th, knew both wars, and the cold one, too. Then, when I was born, you were each of you almost my age I am now. I was born smack-dab on the dividing line monster fifty sent me in to fight. I am becoming an old man in the 21st. My coming of age was the dying of the 20th. Yes. My dearest grandparents, you saw automobiles conquer the world; I have seen rockets take the moon.
the crowds
getting wetla gente
amontonadase está mojandosoaked
rainquiere lloverperhaps the woman beside you at the little street restaurant tent picked apart the very meat you're chewing on now she sits shredding more and more threads from a chunk... what? a brisket?
yes it looks like a brisket in a bag she tears off a chunk a thready, fibrous chunk, then carefully, separates
thread after thread after thread just like these wrapped up in the rolled tacos you just ate
now it's time for a cheese and mushroom quesadilla
la carne es del pecho de res the meat is from the breast of beef
It wants to rain today.
I want to go back and re-edit yesterday, the day before, and all those weeks of January. But I won't. The diary must stand as it was written. That is my new rule.sufficient for the day is the evil thereofOh I will go through and harvest poems and prose for use in other, more formal works, but I simply must (I say, I think, I decide I must) stop treating the diary pages as precious "finished" products that must forever be polished and re-polished and re-vised and vised and sed and nuff sed already.The diary@blog is become like a column. The pressure to write just for right now, today, and spend only today writing and revising it. If anything is good enough to stand out, extract it later and let it step out on its own, as its own. But the diary, the blog, the web-log, the diary@blog, shall remain a daily thing which truly shall now be guided by that "spontaneous" ideal :
sufficient for the day is the evil thereofamen ahem period stop.It wants to rain today.
It wants to rain. It tries to rain in the morning, then gives up. It succeeds in the mid-day. All the streetmarket booths either stretch out more plastic tarps, or fold up shop and quit."Fold up shop" my God that saying is literally true here. "On wheels" = sobre-ruedas. Yes.
I was talking with Michaelangelo the plant seller and later with... who was it... I forget... wait a minute... someone...
Ding dong darn I can't remember but it was someone else, Michaelangelo was laughing and blunt he didn't really tell me all that much. But the other one...
Can't even remember if it was man or woman, the memory of that information is over-written by Miguelito's laughing gesture, wild, shaking arms, spikey hair, and...
Anyway I was talking to one, two, maybe even three people recently, asking them about the AH I THINK I REMEMBER IT WAS THE GUY WHO sold me a saucepan last week
About the Lady Jesus Church whose name and picture is on the official yellow seal coat-of-arms that adorns the doors of trucks and panel vans of so many street-sellers
and it turns out the lady in question was an organizer and she has passed on to her reward several years ago now and she organized marches and protests by groups of street-sellers who had to struggle to get the city to finally recognize and legitimize their street marketsthey had to fight against all the store-owners you know they don't want people just selling out on the street without having all the overhead of rent and utilities etc.etcet.etcetera no they don't and they didn't and the Lady Jesus Church (Doña Chuy Iglesias) was their leader, locally, I think it was locally I don't think she was a big national leader or anything but I really do NOT know and you, dear readershould remember what Teresa told me she said to her landlady
who was saying how much Mister Daniel knows and Tere said yes, and what he doesn't know he will make up ("invent") heh hee hoo ho ho mmm yes.
Anyway it wanted to rain today and it succeeded. I went twice to the street market, not buying very much just some cheese for the week to come and a few old LP records at fifty cents apiece and came home and put on my raincoat I bought several months ago and went back through the rain and eventually sat down at one of my favorite snack tents and ate and wrote about that shredded meat in the right hand column
it really was more like a drizzle you know one of our typical California rains we very rarely get heavy rain mostly drizzle down here at the end of the west coast before the desert has squeezed the last drops out of the storms that sometimes then slide across the mountains and get more disturbed and meet up with a tropical flow coming up from the gulf of Mexico and sweep freshly strengthened up across the south toward the northeast where they collide with cold air from the north and raise holy hell over the lakes and New York but but
but that's a long long way away and several lifetimes of change
what is or is not a storm is always changing as systems collide and merge and so forth
but our typical winter weather has not been very wet this year, in contrast to everything I expected I expected this winter to be very very wet but we have had a pacific high holding off the northern storms that usually sweep down from the gulf of Alaska but today one finally got here and
I went walking through it gentle drizzle not hardly enough to make the river run through the streets it does you know some of the local streets are almost in line with the old nature natural run-off rain drainage of this big, broad mesa, and I stopped
along the way home at the new little internet cafe on the corner only four blocks from home much closer than the boulevard of fine arts only six computers but only ten pesos an hour and they like me because I am quiet don't yell and make a scandal
and I answered a couple emails one from Carlota and one from Aida saying quick send me a poem everyone who's going to Mexicali on the 2nd and 3rd for the big reading (hotel, food, transportation paid, and an honorarium [that was another one of my resolutions for this year, that not only do I keep on getting invited to conferences and readings but that they pay me, too not much, but it is the first payment since CECUT back in 2003] and now this, a welcoming performance wow) well we won't be the only poets there are writers coming from all over I hear and we are just a few from Tijuana mmm I am looking forward to this I hardly know Mexicali at all it will be very interesting and IT AINT SUMMER!!!!!! no.
anyway they have a group of actors who are going to perform some of our poems and my first reaction was of course jealous egotistical why not I am such a good actor huh! But then I calmed down and said Daniel, chill. They want you enough to perform your poetry?! Dude. Duh. Pick something worthwhile. So I thought and decided hmm something very very border and I picked the poem that Isabel Fraire told me made her cry and decide to give me the first prize in the Frontera Ford
well anyway
friday the 16th meanwhile is the big PUENTE show at LA Cetto cava and you are determined, decided, insistant with yourself that you will not just sit there and read from a piece of paper
no, you will recite from memory
you will perform
in two
l a n g u a g e s
I am still trying to decide what
I have ten minutes to "read"
but I won't "read"
rather I shall perform
thinking about downtown vision
and then night hawk
Amen. Goodbye.
or well... goodbye for now at least
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