Looking for Spring

Yesterday was Piper's 2nd birthday. We had a lovely little party, mom, dad, and ice cream cake and presents after dinner. Piper was particularly excited by the little tikes basketball hoop and basketball she got. I took many pictures of her putting the ball into the net. She can throw pretty well for a little kid. She can't catch worth a darn though. But it looks like this will be a big part of the spring. If spring ever actually gets here. Eliot must have been talking about this spring when he wrote that April is the cruelest month stuff. It is cold. It is rainy. It is lucky to get into the fifties every day. People are getting restless. I know I am.

Paige is due to come this weekend, having finished her run in Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dream Coat at UHigh. We also hope to see Dan Keding and Tandy Lacy, who would like to have a small share in the Piper's second birthday.

I posted two old poems concerning June Christy (and my mild obsession with her) to the poetry blog. I also recently found my autographed picture of her from the 1940s. One of these days I'll put it up on the blog.

May the Lady Arianrhod show us Her mercy this cold April day.

Piper is Two!

Today Piper is two years old. I will never forget the night she was born, here in Urbana at Carle Hospital. Kimberly had developed the blood pressure disease that is associated with pregnancy. She was on bedrest the previous two weeks. Then on the Friday before Piper's appearance she worked all morning with a friend from her office. That afternoon she had a terrible headache, and her blood pressure was 150/115. I called the hospital and they said to bring her in.

After we were there and she had been looked at the doctor there told us that we would be there until the baby was born. Since Kimb was only a little more than seven months into the pregnancy we knew things were gonna be tough. They kept her there and medicated her. They also did numerous ultra sounds on the baby. On Monday evening they had talked about inducing Kimb. She was just barely at 34 weeks, I believe. That night, at nine, they told us that because of how things were progressing the only real course was to do a c-section right then. Kimb was scared, and I was scared, but kind of relieved. The headache had never gone away, despite all the medications, she seemed to be doing worse to me. I knew that having the baby would relieve the disease, and I was all for that. I was never really worried about Piper, in all this. I was terribly worried about Kimberly.

So our OB came in and they did the c-section at ten that night. And there was our girl, three pounds and ten ounces. A little bird, ready to grow. They did put a tube in her for breathing, but she immediately pulled it out, quite able thank you to breath on her own. Ultimately she was in the NICU at Carle for almost a month. Until she was able to eat safely on her own.

Now she is a big, healthy two year old. We have ice cream cake and many presents from Grandma and Grandpa. We have a basketball goal and basketball (that is a current interest), toddler-size. We will have a wonderful celebration.

Thank you my Darling Lady for this greatest of all gifts. Piper Gwynne Britton, a true daughter of Arianrhod.

Piper as Pierrot 

Bad Moon Rising; Frist to Set Off Bomb

Well, I figured out how to post pictures to this blog. And though it is from last fall, I think the picture of Piper in her Samhain's Eve costume is an appropriate first image.

Looking at all the old manuscripts gives me a sense of the weird breadth of my strange life. I have known a lot of good people who have done a lot of interesting work over the last 35 years. What this reveals about me I don't know, but I am sure it does reveal something. And I'll be dwelling on it in the middle of the night, no doubt.

I read numerous political blogs for various reasons. I read Juan Cole to find out how bad it really is in Iraq where many people are dying every day. As a great believer in John Donne's sermon's words (no man is an island), every death has some small effect on me and I try and offer a prayer for their souls. The fifty who died in Japan yesterday. The thousands of Aids victims in south and central Africa. All these things effect me. Should they? I am darned if I know. I just know that I feel connected and the small tugs of loss are very real.

I also read Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo, to keep up with the democratic center. I read the Bullmoose because, though a socalled conservative he hates the Bushies more than anybody. I look at the Daily Kos and the Drudge Retort (the liberal answer to Matt Drudge's lying eyes). And I read numerous papers online, the NY Times, the Washington Post, the Guardian, LeMonde.

What I get from all this is usually pretty disheartening. There is always that buzz of people arguing about the details and what they mean. It can be interesting. The sad fact however is that these days within the buzz you can hear the nihilist drone of the xtian right who need to impose their will upon us at any cost. The cost, of course, will be the constitution of the united states. The cost will be a free society. If they win, it will be gone.

What people aren't saying is this: The xtian right is in a war with the rest of us. They eventually will be in a war with the Moslems, too. They need to impose their rules on everybody else. Just like the ayatollahs in Iran. They are absolutely no different. It is because of the Old Testament that they are this way, both groups. It is the Old Testament that creates the seeds for the destruction of our way of life. Believe me, they don't give a crap for Thomas Jefferson or any of the other founding fathers. They give them lip service, but they hate them and their ideas. The xtians that we hear about are against us utterly and completely. And they won't mind killing us all off if we don't play by their rules.

There is a reckoning coming. A new dark age is just over the horizon. No place is safe. The best we can do is speak the truth and hope the citizenry loses its blinders before the police state of religion comes into full flower. Our best hope for freedom lies in the financial collapse that George W. Bush is engineering. He thinks that making the rich really rich is what it is all about. But ultimately the destruction his policies create will destroy him, his party, his legacy, and probably this civilization.

I think Frist will have to enact the nuclear option this week or next and that all power will be brought to bear upon his minions in the senate. I predict that bad feeling will ripple from this like the waves in a pond. The battle will be thus and truly joined. I urge you to email your senator and congressman today to choose the side of freedom. I spent a good deal of yesterday emailing particularly middle of the road Republican senators. They are the only hope of this land.

The Bullmoose talked today about a middle way party. I don't know if that can ever fly. He was suggesting Bob Kerry and John McCain. McCain had his chance to come onto the democratic ticket last summer and save us all from this and he didn't do it. But he still represents a middle of the road Republican party. Is there such a thing? Will they break rank to save the republic? Or have they been threatened with political death by the minions of the religous right and the white house? We shall see what happens. If Frist loses, then the presidency is broken and Bush truly begins to look like a lame duck. This will enrage the xtians and they will start looking for people to publicly destroy. And they will do whatever it takes for they have no moral structure whatsoever. Remember that. They will lie, cheat, steal, misrepresent, and many of them will be doing it with a gun in their hands. That guy who went to prison for the abortion clinic bombings is just the tip of the ice berg.

Once again I call for the immediate secession of the northeastern states. A new treaty organization with the European Union can create the political scenario that will save us all from the hegemony of the southern xtian dictatorship.

May the Lady give us the strength and the will to live through these times.

Manuscript Hopping 2005

An erratic time. Kimb and I spent the weekend moving some bookshelves and putting our desk over in front of the large windows in the dining room. This required moving multiple objects and boxes of paper. I still have more paper than the average bear. But it did give me a chance to discover several boxes of old manuscripts. Among the things I found were mss. of several stories from Ela White's retelling of the greek myths. Brilliant and wonderful work. I miss Ela's wisdom and scholarship. I assume she is still living down the Illinois River outside of Michael, Illinois with the geek she is married to in that strange house in the country.

I also discovered a couple of manuscripts by a man I used to know who wrote poetry, Steve Dolgin. He's a teacher in Michigan these days, I hear. I found a manuscript of his long poem, Orexia, and a short manuscript of a novel he worked on briefly, Maybe I'm a Sailor. Dolgin was in Knoepfle's first poetry class. He later hung out with Sandi Riseman and myself. We'd go to a bar and get drunk and then drive out to Knoepfle's and be obnoxious and all about the Word. He was, in those days, a very handsome young man and he had a longterm romantic relationship with a woman named Mary Ann Demas. This relationship was extremely tortured, though I was never sure why. Back when I lived on Scarritt street, this girl, Nancy Isaacs used to walk down the alley from where she lived on Second, and visit me, primarily because she had the hots for Steven and wanted to talk about it. Later she went to the Mahareshi's university in Iowa. She was a truly pretty girl.

What else? I found my copy of Martha Miller's brilliant collection of stories about Springfield's Levee district in the sixties and seventies. I heard these stories read in group over a decade and they only seemed to get better. The good news (and it is very good news indeed) is that Martha has found a publisher for this collection. Last I heard she was hard at work, re-writing it. "Lady Verushka's Lover," the story of a female impersonater and her married boyfriend, still resonates strongly in my mind as a retelling of very human travails. Much of this material is based on oral histories Martha did with some of the people involved. When this book is published everyone who has ever lived in Springfield should get a copy. And I mean it. Martha now has three other books on the market, all of them worth the read: Skin to Skin, a collection of stories, and two mysteries, Nine Nights on the Windy Tree, and Dispatch to Death. I note that Amazon already had Tales from the Levee listed, though it is not scheduled to be available until September. What good news!

Anyway, there are many other manuscripts in the boxes in my dining room. I did, also, find a manuscript of my own that I have been looking for: Approaching Candlemas in a Sports Car, Poems on the Subject of Pain in a Damaged Universe. A collection I put together in the mid-90s to try and take another run at the Lincoln Library Writer of the Year award. I never managed to even get noticed in that lottery. BB won it, and so did Rosie, twice. And Hugh Moore won it a couple of times. All people I respect. I guess my stuff is just too damn weird. Corlyss wrote me the other day that I am an awfully 'intellectual' writer, when it comes to the poems. I guess so. But I am still pretty damn happy with the piece I wrote last week.

Food
We had a nice brunch with Dan Keding and Tandy Lacy at Radio Marias yesterday. Kimb had some lamb kabobs that were great. And a bloody mary I wish I had had. I had a seafood sampler that had a pretty good crab cake and some spicy shrimps in it. Dan had a pork roast with a blueberry sauce on it that he said was grand.

Saturday night Kimb made another great squash soup, which we had with a bottle of Pinot Noir that I bought in tribute to a great movie: Sideways. Highly recommended. If you like wine you'll appreciate the main character's wine obsession. But even if you don't you should see this movie. I felt a lot like the main character, a schoolteacher, failed writer, with his own little integrity, trying to do the right thing. It was a kind of sad movie, but it had a positive ending and there was much great stuff in it. Sandra Oh, who was in Under the Tuscan Sun, has a small but important part in it and she does mention needing to be spanked. That was pretty funny. We also rented Bambi, hoping that Piper might be convinced to watch another movie, besides Shrek. Didn't work. She was bored, as were we. Ah well.

Politics
I understand the Republicans are now saying the democrats invented the term "nuclear option." This is a complete lie (you can find numerous examples of Frist and others using this phrase in the media over the last three months) and typical of how they try and control the language, and thus the minds, of the american public. How sleazy can these guys get? Well, if Frist does run for president I will do my best to defeat him, that's for sure.

May the Lady Arianrhod bring the spring to this land. May the trees prosper and the flowers grow and the herbs get tall in the May sun! May we all live and let live. It is the only way this once-great country will survive.

Swimming in the Deep End

For the first time in quite awhile I have spent the day going over a poem in my head. Sandy Riseman offered some very specific advice about my new poem, who she is, that resonated through me. I spent a lot of today trying to figure out what I am saying to myself in this poem. Every time I read it I get something else from what is said. And it is pretty exciting. I admit that I have no sense of how it plays to the average standard world, but the language at least is musical and it has that lovely rhythm I am partial to.

The cough will not completely go away, but it is getting to be less painful and I did sleep some last night. I am hoping to have a good weekend.

The good news from the world of politics is that the Bolton nomination is clearly in trouble. The bad news is the Tom Delay and his minions are determined to destroy the federal judiciary, thus weakening and ultimately destroying the republic. This government is built on that three-legged stool, the presidency, the congress, and the courts. The Repugnants have taken the presidency and the congress and they actually have put far more judges on the courts than the dems, but that doesn't matter. If they won't do what Tom Delay wants they dserve to be shot. That's what they are saying in Congress these days. What gets me is how nobody in the media is really saying what this all means. The end of the Republic folks. They are taking apart the United States that we knew and preparing a religiously based government for us instead.

How long before the Supreme Court is abolished? I am betting six to ten years. Of course there is a real chance there will be a large economic collapse before then. And the ice bergs will float up the Potomac, raising the water level and making real estate even more valuable.

And the Pope, so conciliatory, is essentially the representative of Satan on earth now. Soon the Imams will have found this out and the real war will start.

Not that I'm a pessimist. I think my life will be just fine. I have the most beautiful and sweetest baby in the world. My teenager is smart, funny, too attractive for her own good and not doing any drugs. And my grown son had the smarts to marry, the first time, a woman who complements him while retaining her own self and who is brilliant, creative, and a decent human being. So I am batting 1000 when it comes to the offspring. My own life has also gotten a great deal better due to my answered prayers to Great Arianrhod, the Welsh Lady who has been maligned in myth but who will give you a chance to learn the truth about yourself, if you have the moral courage.

No food notes. We had a fine french onion soup last night, made with a store-bought beef stock. It was very good. Tonight we are at loose ends, foodwise. Store after work. I am too tired to put in too much time, though I did get the kitchen mostly cleaned up this a.m. I am off tomorrow all day, as Kimberly has software training at the Big U.

This weekend we hope to get back into the yard. We got a lot of the herbs put in last Sunday. This weekend there is a lot of cleanup to do. I noticed the neighbor is perhaps taking down one of the two honey locusts in his backyard, the one closest to us. I knew it was dying, but it is still sad to see an old tree succumb. Few aspects of being mean as much to me as the trees. I would really like to live in a place where there are far more trees than people again. Perhaps the Lady will grant me this wish down the road.

Recovering

Those times that you don't immediately recover from an infection or illness bring on that guessing game with mortality. Am I getting old and losing the efficacy of my immune system? Well, certainly. But this particular round of system deficiency is probably not the one that will take you round the track that final time. Still, the paranoia that must accompany the knowledge that biological life is inherently time-limited is an omnipresent friend.

We should celebrate the not-knowing, of course. My mother always used to club me over the head with it: "you know not the place nor the hour..." And let's keep it that way.

The clinic finally saw fit to give me some cough syrup with codeine in it, plus a heavy duty expensive anti-biotic. Last night I was only up four or five times, with the coughing. Kimb says it was much less profound. And today I feel like I have slept a little more. I believe there was some dreaming involved.

Yesterday was a wasted day in most respects. I could never quite bring myself to bear. The house is in an amazing state. Dinner was pedestrian tacos. I vaguely recall watching tv. I did read extensively in the Anne Sexton letters book. I really like Sexton's poetry, reminding me of me, of course, though I am terribly obscure and she is not. That is perhaps why people read her and do not read me. Heh. I am still thrashing around, working with the poem I posted to my website, Homage & Apology, day before yesterday.

The piece is directly concerned with a longterm relationship from approximately a quarter of a century ago. This woman was not a romantic liaison, but we were intimate in the philosophic sense of things. I was with Bradway in those days. Cecil was a truly flawed person, but a person of great psychic power. A true adept. I spent a lot of time with her during the period 1980-1986. In 1986 she sent me a letter telling me that I was too cruel to be her friend. What had happened was that I had begun to see through the veil she kept up and I am the kind of person who calls you on what I see you doing and saying. She didn't care for that. Essentially the same thing happened with Bradway some eight years after that.

There are just certain people who will not share reality with you, unless you accept their frame of reference without argument. I am committed to a truthful life; so when I see something obviously not honest I have this duty to say so and figure out why it is the way it is. Believe me, this makes watching Fox news very difficult indeed.

In any case, in working on the piece, I realised how much I also loved and admired Cecil. For so long I have only thought of her as someone to be feared. She has attacked me, both physically and psychically, numerous times in the past and I have simply avoided the place she held in my memory. But that must now be addressed. And this poem is the first act of that r'approchment. Mind you, I have no desire to see or talk with this person, although I know she is living in Albuquerque these days. But I need to recover the good things about the relationship.

Among other things, she is one of the few people to have actually read one of my novels. She read the manuscript of Stones Out of Time that BB worked up when we were living in Wichita in 1982. She never really gave me any feedback on it, though. But it is a stark, painful story with lots of bad sex in it. So, perhaps that wasn't too surprising.

I can remember sitting around her living room on South Spring, not far from Rosie's apartment (and the last place I lived with Pat Smith), playing Gram Parson's "Grievous Angel" on a tube amp that I bought at a garage sale and kept at her apartment. Of course we were smoking pot. Gram and Emmylou Harris singing "Love Hurts", the Everly Brothers song, was the most painful country ballad I have ever heard. Not like that disturbing heavy metal version (Nazareth? some stupid band like that), all histrionics. This cut is delicate, like a razor being drawn lightly across the flesh.

She wrote a great novel, too. The Loser's Bar. I still have a copy of it in my files. I have a lot of odd manuscripts in my files. One of these days I guess I should do a catalog. I have no clue what will happen to all this paper when I pass. I suppose I shouldn't care. But all this means something to me. It has reality. It has weight in the phenomenol universe.

All being is a version of an alphabet, a character set of symbols that take the place of and then become real things/people/animals/objects in the actual world. And yes, I believe there is an actual world. I do think it is a subset of the greater reality. But that gets into that "planes" (of existence) discussion.

Bad Moon Rising

I see the cardinals allowed themselves to be stampeded into voting in old Hitler Youth his ownself, Ratzinger. He is an old man, so he won't be with us too many years, but he will have plenty of time to damage his church in all sorts of doctrinaire ways. Ratzinger was the boy these days in charge of what used to be called the Inquisition. He has always been here to keep us all on the straight and narrow. And yes, he did fight for the nazis, although he claims his heart wasn't in it and to prove that he notes that he deserted his post. How's that for another ace for Holy Mother Church?

The coughing disease continues. Today was mighty useless, but the dr. at Carle broke down and gave me some cough med with codeine in it. I am hoping to get through this night with enough sleep to have a dream.

I posted a new poem on Homage and Apology yesterday. Although I can now see there is a transition problem early in the piece, I am otherwise pretty excited by this poem. It is another in my series of pieces based upon people that I knew well and that were important in my life. I hope those of you with an interest will take a look at it.

Tom Delay has issued a defense, saying that it is all the media and the Democrats and that it doesn't matter who paid for his junkets, because he believed they were paid for by charitable organizations. The question I have for him is why would anybody buy you trips overseas except that they want things from you? And why would you let anybody buy you things, unless you expected to help them and further their interests? The problem with this is that he is no different than Dan Rostenkowski. He has deceived himself into thinking he can do no wrong. I believe Dante has him in the fifth circle of hell, along with the hypocritical clerics.

Food has been not very interesting. I am not capable of much these days. There is a fever in the mind, however. Piper seems like she is getting over it all. Kimb is hard at work here. We are getting a gift together for the baby shower for Randy and Melissa that takes place this Saturday.

I wish I could be more optimistic about this reality we occupy. But the historical signs are just not good. The election of Ratzinger is a very bad sign indeed. I feel bad for the millions of catholics, struggling with an impossible burden and then being tortured by intellectual effete snobs like this man. He has no charity in him. No mercy. And, quoting the european press, 'no imagination.' Perfect. The cardinals picked a Bush guy.

The question is, will they silence us all? By the giving silver light of the great silver wheel of the Lady, bringing us the truth we do not want, I speak the words I must, holding the integrity of Her being central to our continued survival.

Normal Spring Day

Listening to June Christy singing about "Easy Street" and waiting for the next round of recycled code here at the factory. I had yet another bad night, trying to get a breath between rounds of coughing. A couple of cups of caffeinated cafe have helped to shore up Tim's physical reality.

My old friend, Clare Martin, sent me a long prose piece she has been working on that exploits her travels to Russia (with her son and husband) to work on an archaeological site of a famous and legendary battle between the russians and the tatars. It is a really wonderful piece, not least because of how she uses the historicity to counterpoinbt both her personal life and the actual reality of existence in a dig in post-soviet russia.

This is the advantage to the life I have led. Perfectly wonderful people send me serious work to enjoy, learn from, comment on, and then I get a tiny soupcon of pride that I was involved with such a wonderful piece of work. When I see Martha Miller's books on Amazon, I remember sitting around the living room on Bryn Mawr, listening to her find and develop Bertha-the lawyer, and, later, her cab-driver heroine. Life is a great quilt of people, words, trees, rivers, weather, musics, food and love. Kimb called me up to tell me the baby had pooed on the potty for the first time. It's a normal spring day.

Circling the Wagons

Well this service (blogger) is free, but you do get what you pay for. Half the time it doesn't work in one way or another. It is about 1 a.m. here in central Illinois. I am sitting in front of the computer because my hacking cough has not gone away. I went to the doctor today and they did nothing for me. I had some know-nothing resident who told me how great Nyquil is and sent me home. Later, at the grocery store, I was hacking so bad that the lady from the meat counter brought me out a cup of ice water. This is the first time in quite awhile that modern medicine has failed me. I think it was mainly the little shithead doctor. He said to call if I didn't get better in a couple of days. Oh, you mean after the weekend?

I can hardly move here. My mind is thick with multiple doses of cough medicine. If I could just figure out how to lie down and sleep I'd be so much better.

Lately I just don't seem to understand things anymore. I read much of Anne Sexton's lettes today, an old volume. Mostly it made me want to find her poems again and read them. Her voice is more articulate in the poems themselves. I think it is remarkably ironic that Pat Smith was not at all familiar with Sexton's poetry. Pat's poetry shared a comman stance and sometimes a common language. They were both Episcopalian believers, they both were trapped by their relationship with their own sexuality, they both couldn't quit smoking. Pat however had her mother's suicide when Pat was 13 hovering over her and her family. And Sexton was always suicidal, as these letters make clear.

I particularly like Sexton's work when it is narrative. So the poems of Transformations are wonderful retellings of Grimm in Anne's own idiomatic 1960s voice. Good stuff. Her last book An Awful Rowing Toward God, says it all: trying to understand how the Deity could create this arcane tortured world and subject those H/She loves to its withering daily darkness. Well, checking out is something we all get to do eventually. And writers checking out for their own reasons is just part of the wallpaper anymore.

I spent many years contemplating suicide. As I was raised catholic I understood that in those terms it was an unpardonable sin. There's that great 70s porno flic, the Devil in Miss Jones. Miss Jones kills herself in an erotically charged bathtub scene. Next thing she knows she's at a desk in a mansion and the man is telling her that she pretty much has to go to hell now because suicide is the one thing "they" won't forgive. She begs for the opportunity to lead a life of sin, seeing as how the one sin she committed is going to get her toasted anyway. They let her go back and she fucks people one at at time and in combination. Also fruit and a large python, as I recall. Let's hear it for suicide.

I pray for another day of life every day, but I have to say that with this current political order descending upon us, I can understand those who might be becoming fearful and taking the checkout procedure. When I was in Oregon Joel went out of his way to defeat one of my trending arguments about the danger of those on the right. On paper, logically, he was right. I was making large statements which no one could ever prove right. The flaw in the argument. Of course, the real problem is that of viewpoint. My vision is dark and he is resisting that darkness now. He is probably right to do that, but it doesn't change the shadows creeping across the body politic. I may be wrong on the details, or the way it will come down, but I am right that things are not good and that 'the people' are essentially broken now.

The war on science. The war on truth. Those on the right who are concerned only with their vision and its implementation. Global warming. Electronic IDs in passports. The only rational thing I can do is to ask my version of the Creator being for Her mercy. Ultimately life is about survival and truth. And you can't find the truth if you don't survive.

The Room Folded In On Itself

I dreamed about Rosie the other night. Rosie Richmond. She could always make you feel comfortable, even if you and her disagreed radically about whatever you were talking about.

I found this link on Bifurcated Rivets today: http://www.juliadarling.co.uk/weblog/index.html

I don't know who Julia Darling was really, an english poet and novelist, but the poem on this page is a good description of the act of leaving the flesh. How do I know this? My mind has been there. I like to think Rosie had this kind of ending. Since the feminists ran her departure, and since I was persona non grata among them at the time, I have no sense of her passing. I hope it was wonderful. Though not a perfect person, she was pretty honest about herself and her failings.

Battling Dis-ease, Waiting for Spring

This week has been very painful and awkward. Make a note, when you have a small child both parents and said child cannot be sick simultaneously. It becomes very difficult for anyone to get well. Last night was the worst; I'd get to sleep then wake up coughing, and I'd wake everybody else up, too. At one point Piper was up for two hours, part of that attributable to my coughing.

Meanwhile it is thinking about turning out to be spring after all. This weekend the temperature here is rumoured to be in the 70s. If we have any energy at all there is plenty of yardwork that needs to be done, starting with getting my lawn mowed. I'd like to see us get some herbs in, also. But that will all come.

I feel pretty much cut off from the culture these days. The bad news proliferates out there. The congress is about to repeal the inheritance tax (which the righties call the "death tax" to villify it). This will mean that you can leave all your money to your children forever. Here comes a true aristocracy. Not that we haven't had one, but this will just make it easier to protect capitol and make the poor people pay for the costs of the culture and government. Why should the aristocrats have to put any money into government? After all they made their money (mainly on the backs of other's labors). The truly sickening part of this is that this bill will probably cost in the neighborhood of a trillion dollars in the next decade. Where is that money going to come from? If we had that money we could "fix" the social security "problem" by paying off the debts that the rest of the government owes to SS. Remember Al Gore's "lockbox"? The Repugs ridicule it, but it was the right thing to do.

But that is what we no longer want to do as a culture. We no longer care if we do the right thing. This is what the socalled Moral Rightwingers have done to us. They have brought us low. The world used to see us as sort of Boy Scout-like. Maybe not always aware of what was intelligent, but at least we always had a generous side to our view of the world. That is totally gone. Now the world is clear on the fact that we don't give a rats ass even for our own poor, much less their's. The evil just spreads.

And the scuttlebutt out there has an even more virulent German conservative cardinal being made il papa. The moral destruction continues apace. The Roman church is clearly acting in only the interests of its own power structure. If there were a devil he would glory in the way these people do "business". A conservative German. Charming.

We had a Kimberly-created soup for dinner last night, based on my chicken stock. It was quite good, featuring leeks, potatoes, carrots and a parsnip. I have a free range chicken for tonight. Piper loves chicken and we are working on getting her to eat something.

Perhaps this weekend we will buy some thyme for the Lady. It is still a few weeks to the farmers market here. We went to a great one in Eugene. The market here pales in comparison. Paige said it made her feel like she had gone back in time to the sixties, so rife was it with counter cultural figures. Very pleasant indeed.

You know, Arianrhod was Dylan's mother. The first Dylan, the sea-god. She also bore Llew Law Gyffes who can also be called Gwynn. And Arthur in some stories goes to live in Caer Arianrhod, after his mortal wound in battle with his own son. An old story, there. The Theme, as Graves would have it. I thank the Lady for Her continued patience with me.

Thoughts on Spring

It is a sunny, slightly chilly day here in central Illinois. We are all still sick and the baby has had special trouble involving changing her clothes completely several times now. I took her into the pediatrician who was very reassuring. "Probably the result of traveling."

Last night I baked some country style pork ribs with a lemon-honey-mustard glaze. They were good with shoepeg corn and some rice. Tonight we have a chicken stock to soup with. It tastes quite yummy as a stock so we shall see where Kimberly takes it. When we were in Eugene, I noticed that Joel and Tricia have the Peterson Soup book that Paige bought Kimberly for her birthday. As a matter of fact, Joel and Tricia had numerous books that we have and a few that we don't but would like to have. Particularly the Larousse Gastronomique, which is pretty much an encylcopedia of food information.

I haven't been sleeping much this week, due to the cough that comes over me when I go prone. So I am a little loopy, though capable of doing chores and errands. This will go some distance to explaining the mild quality of these postings. My opinions have suffered some loss of passion lately. But I am sure the Repugs will eventually make us all mad, with their shock and awe on Capitol hill.

It is true, at least, that Bush's poll numbers are headed in only one direction: Down. Because, no matter how many votes he got, the country is not doing all that well, the war is not doing all that well, and people, even the ones who voted for him, tend to think of him as essentially a minor leaguer. I suppose the only real question is how much more destruction he will cause before these four years pass.

And the Republicans majorities turn out to be useful only for giving corporations tax breaks. Nothing else runs well in DC, a town that is now completely owned by the Republican machine. Remember when they used to rail about those crooks in Washington? Well, now they are them, to paraphrase Walt Kelly.

Will Spring finally get around to being here and staying here? We've had the equinox and now I am ready to mow my front yard (and it really needs it). But, it's still too chilly. Maybe by the time they elect a new and even more conservative pope from the ranks of Opus Dei Spring will show up for those of us not bound by canon law. Looking forward to the herb garden, as always.

Well, the Lady never fails me. I know this will be a good spring, with my two year old and my sixteen year old and my grown son in Oregon.

Back Home in Illinois

Another noble two seconds on the map. I haven't posted but once in the last two weeks, and therefore recognize that I have probably lost my two or three readers. That is as it must be.

We have returned from the west coast. It was beautiful and springlike out there, but rather cold in Oregon. We had a good time and spent quite a lot of money. That is to be expected. Gas was running about 2.49-2.59 a gallon for regular out there.

High points of traveling: Kimb's mom gave me a coupon book for free drinks on the Southwest flight out and I had me a couple of Jack and ginger ales. The baby travelled pretty well, for someone locked in a very small space for hours on end. I had me several glasses of wine out of a bottle that retails for $145 at Kimb's Uncle Stan's vineyard (that he works at). We had a tour of the facilities and they cracked a bottle of their cabernet sauvignon and it was quite good.

We had several good meals in restaurants, notably Bouchon in the Napa region. This restaurant is the lower end model of the French Laundry which the same guy owns and runs. The food was great and we spent $66 just having a bit of lunch. The profiteroles were great. The quiche was really good and has inspired me to look into making quiche again. Later we had a very nice evening fest at a restaurant in downtown Eugene.

We spent a couple of days at my son's house in Eugene. I have come to really appreciate what an interesting and unique woman he is married to. Tricia Berg is an accomplished quilter and obviously good at her architect's role. She is also sweet and beautiful and very wise. He's a lucky man and clearly knows he is. They work well together. I am happy for that. I spent so much of my life making mistakes in my relationships. I am dedicated to not doing that again. Kimberly means everything to me, now.

It was funny seeing the old pictures of myself in Joel's book of photos of his life. There are a couple of me from back when Becky McGovern and I had set up housekeeping in Laclede Town in St. Louis. Man we were naifs. You can practically see "dumb as fuck" written across my forehead. I suppose we could have done worse. One thing is true: Joel is a good person, leading a valuable life. I hope he is always well.

We saw an exhibition of pre-raphaelites at the Portland Art Museum, and they had an exhibit of Diane Arbus photographs. Both were great fun. I saw many things I have only seen in books.

Kimb and Piper and myself all caught colds somewhere in there and the last few days became lost in the pain of congestion and sore throats. Piper had a tough time sleeping and of course we were up with her at Joel's house. I am still pretty sick, but glad to be home in my own bed. I slept pretty well last night.

As always it was great traveling with Bob and Arlene. They are world class travelers, good at figuring out where they are and where they want to go. Fearless at striking out for the unknown.

And the Britton family in California treated us very well indeed. I knew Bob's children were extraordinary this way. I did not realize the whole family is like this. Such a contrast to the way my family is. Bob's mother, Maryann Britton, gave us a sheet of the addresses of her grandchildren and great-grandchildren, and not only was my daughter Paige listed on it, but so was Joel and Tricia. And she got all the names right. I have to say, when I am ninety I hope to be so lucid as this woman. She is frail, but the mind is still very keen indeed.

On the Road, in Eugene, Oregon

On the road. We are in Eugene, toward the end of our trip out West. It is rainy and somewhat cold here. But spring is fairly far progressed and it is very very green. I am sitting at the computer in my son's workroom. Piper is asleep and Kimb is out with Joel's wife, Tricia, at an exhibit of quilts. Tricia quilts and has some amazing work here in their home. Paige is reading a Phil Dick novel in the other room. Joel is stuck entertaining my mother-in-law who is a bit petulant at not being the center of attention.

Paige and I went out this morning and toured the University of Oregon campus. She was very impressed iwth it. It is, of course, quite beautiful when compared with Illinois State University in Normal, where her stepdad, Doug, teaches. I don't know how serious she is about tryinbg to go here. I doubt if her mother will let her go that far away from her. But you never know.

Joel got out the pictures of himself in childhood and there were a few of me, also, before Becky McGovern kicked me out in 1973 (on Valentine's day!). I was a skinny, longhaired freak. I made a great number of mistakes in those days. But, we all managed to live through it. Joel has made a very good life for himself and for Tricia. And Tricia is beautiful, smart, and very good. A truly decent human being. Creative too.

I've been reading in the White Goddess again. This foray leads me to the discussion of the Holy Spirit, which turns out to be a female aspect of the deity in early gnostic/xtianity. The sex of the words is different in different languages and so this aspect was lost. Typical of that religion. It doesn't even know itself. How can there be truth in the confusion and deception practiced by the Roman church? I think Karol Wotyla has much to face right now. His deceptions and actions hurt millions of people, mainly for his own prejudices and fear of sexuallity. How sad for us all that John the23rd was succeeded by such a small minded central european.

May the Lady watch over us all now. May the Lady bring health back to my poor infant daughter who has her first serious cold and to my teenage daughter who is hacking from the cold she acquired in Toronto last week. May you all be well.