Squall

Squall - Andrew Wyeth - 1986

Gray rolling over swelling blue.

White foam cresting, dropping;

slapping the blue over and over.

The sky darkening quickly

a smokey gray, a dirty dray,

bullet gray and now charcoal.

Winds swirl my hair every which way.
My scalp actually pains under pressure.
Waves whack shoreline rocks repeatedly.

Each tide washes higher- a mist rises over me.
My face wet, my lips taste of salt. 
I lean now with the wind.

The water, darker now
seemingly has swallowed the sky;
the two joined in force- rolling in.




Michael A. Wells

The Mag

Biblio-Mat

A bookstore in Toronto has a novel idea (no pun intended). They have installed a book vending machine.  At Monkey's Paw, for $2 you can take a chance at a book vending machine which dispenses a random used book book.

According to the store owner the response has been positive. Some people feel the random selection as somewhat serendipitous. What do you think?

[source]

Good Days - Bad Days. Finding Happiness

What constitutes a good day to you? I'm not talking about a good day of writing, I'm speaking in more general terms. Of course for a writer a good writing session may well contribute to a overall positive view of your day but there are likely any number of factors that may well contribute to your view of how that day was when the sun goes down.

Late fall and winter are times when I am prone to feel blue. I'm not exactly sure that feeling blue is an automatic bad day. You see there are positive things that can happen on a day when I at a low ebb emotionally.

I have started not long ago to track my days in terms of the degree to which they are good.  I discovered an application on Chrome that I am using both to help define a good day and to track what kind of a day I had.

The application I'm speaking of can be found at illuum.com.

The rating schedule runs from 1 to 9.

• 1- The Worst. You bought the rope but couldn't be bothered to learn how to tie the knot.
• 2- Almost the Worst. You spent the day wondering if you should put your head in the oven or drown in a lake.
• 3 - A Bad Day. It rained, you spilled your coffee, you got yelled at, a dog ate your face, etc.
• 4 - Slightly Below Average. Work Sucked, but there was something good on TV.
• 5 - Average. At no time did you feel particularly happy or sad you just carried on with the routine. 
• 6 - Slightly Above Average. Generally monotonous, but maybe you had one conversation/idea/meal that made you smile.
• 7 - A Good Day. Smiles all around you. You went through your day enjoying everything you did. 
• 8 - A Great Day. Generally good, but something amazing  / memorable happened. A kiss, a party, a trip, an epiphany. 
• 9 -  Awesomeness! You bounded out of bed, had adventures, enjoyed your great relationships, ended the day exhausted and satisfied. 

There is a place to put notes as you rate each day. You could list things you did, people you interacted with, places you went, etc. These will the show up in a cloud with the size impacted by the number of reoccurrences.  It will graph your daily rating lineally and provide the frequency of bad days and good days. 

As an example my current frequencies are a good day every 2.4 days and a bad day every 8.7 days. 

I've heard people say you make your own happiness. I believe there is something to this. I've actually been surprised that I tend to score more more frequently at a rate of 6 and second is a tie between 7 and 8.   Out of  26 days rated I was happy 11 days, content 12 and sad 3. Now I know we poets are supposed the be eternally depressed so maybe I should not be broadcasting these statistics. 

It will be interesting to see how much / if this flatmates at times during the year.  By rating the day, sometimes it forces me to acknowledge that the day was not so bad. Maybe we do make our own happiness. 

Confession Tuesday Stranger than Fiction Edition

Dear Reader:

It's been one leafy lawn week since my last confession.

To the Confessional:

I confess that last week I was looking at the giant maple in our front yard, then the lawn, and thinking, not many leaves in the yard.  This morning as I left for work I looked at the lawn then the tree and thought - ah, not many leaves on the tree.

I confess that sourdough bread toasted with butter and orange marmalade seems like it was just meant to me.

I confess I'm thinking that based upon what we know thus far about the General David Petraues scandal that the e-mail between the two women sounded more  like junior high students then a threat. "I saw what you did under the table." Really?

I confess that the story of the 28 year old woman who allegedly ran over her husband because he didn't vote and Romney lost the election was just a bit on the wacko side. I confessed that if you had asked me what state this happened in there was a good chance I would have guessed correctly Arizona. If I hadn't know the woman was only 28, I might have incorrectly guessed her name was Jan.

I confess that I realized this week my books I want to read/buy list is growing exponentially.  Good news for booksellers, bad news for my budget.

I confess that some days I feel like I should be writing a "running with scissors" sort of memoir but then in the same breath I think how boring it would be.

I confess that while I was sick this past week I had weird dreams at night. One involved a modern version of a Volkswagen Westfalia bus that flew which only made me nostalgic for our Westfalia that didn't fly and sometimes wouldn't even run.

I confess that I have been working to assemble work into a poetry manuscript.  I confess I've heard one to many people ask what has taken so long. I also confess that I have started to do this in the past and it has been hampered by a variety of forms of procrastination, self-criticism, and a hint of reality.

I confess I have been using an application called illuum to track happiness and varying degrees of it. It's been fascinating to see patterns to good days and bad days plus the frequency of good days. I actually plan to blog about this in the near future.

I confess that's all for today and I barely got this done in time~

Ceremony by Louise Gluck

Over the years I've come to appreciate Louise Gluck more and more. The first time I read her she just didn't click with me. It was The Wild Iris that sold me on Gluck. It was so different from anything else of hers that I have read and I not only liked it but was impressed with depth and range of her abilities. The Wild Iris was written in something like 9 or 10 weeks and yet there was noting cheap about the writing.

Her work has grown on me and I've even revisited some of the first poems I read of hers and found for many of the a greater appreciation. Today I found one of her poems that I love. It's such a smart write. It is fresh and the whole concept of the poem is so brilliant you (or at least I) wish you had come up with it yourself.

The poem is titled Ceremony and it was published in The New York Times and originally appeared in her collection "Meadowlands" from 1996. You can read Ceremony here.

Remembering Anne Sexton belatedly

"The beautiful feeling after writing a poem is on the whole better even then after sex, and that's saying a lot"

               ~Anne Sexton

Yesterday was Anne Sexton's birthday - I've been sick and not been on my computer for two days so this is a belated remembrance. You cannot talk about those who have left their mark on American Poetry without mentioning her name. 

Confession Tuesday - Post Election Edition

Dear Reader:  I realize it's not Tuesday and have seen some people with their head in a fog this morning, I beg your dispensation at being late. Actually it's been two weeks and a day since my last confession.

I confess that I missed confession here two weeks ago because I was not in an especially confessional mood. We had just put down one of our cats of some 14 years and it was a sudden and totally unexpected event. I've never been good in dealing with the loss of a pet.

Last night I confess was all about the election. Once I was home I was pretty much zoned into returns. You have to understand my political history to understand the nature and degree to which elections are an obsession to me. During the 14 years that I served on the Democratic Committee including the time I was Chairman of the County Democratic Party I considered myself the consummate vote counter.  I elections I was excellent at projecting were needed votes were and how to turn them out.

My blog post from early yesterday indicated my last best assessment on the potential outcome of the presidential election based upon a number of varying polls, my recollection of 2008 returns and what I anticipated the turnouts would be like. Don't get me wrong I'm no Nate Silver. I'm not boy wonder, but I am better then average with such projections.

The results of my election  picks were not bad. I was under the impression that Florida would be won by Romney even as I felt the numbers there were tightening. And while I believed we would win Virginia, I started doubting myself last night. There was no need to doubt in the end.  Ohio I never really questioned and even as I watched it tighter at one point - once I was able to the the county by county returns and realized most of the Republican counties were 100%  reporting or mid to high 80's and the Cuyohoga County (Cleveland) was only reporting 30% with Obama polling 70% to 29% Romney, I figured the slow counting reflected high turnout and recalling that Obama build up a roughly 200,000 vote margin there 4 years ago, I knew in the end the lead would hold.

So yes I was feeling a little nerdy last night. I confess this but with the caveat that this is about as nerdy as I ever get.

I also confess it was fascinating how many people were overly anxious in the early going. In reality I expected that the word would not come as quickly as it did. The worst "general" election nights I have suffered through are of course 2000 but also 1968 (my very first and while I was not old enough to vote in this election I spent a sizable amount of time each evening and on weekends working in the campaign.)

But seriously, there were several people on Facebook that I felt were about to lose it by the time of 9PM poll closings. I'm not trying to make fun of anyone that messaged me during this time (there were several) but I only hope that my responses served as a calming voice of reason. It's easy to be a little calmer if you see early states going to the opponent that you never believed or counted on having in your path to victory. Meanwhile, I'm sure a more casual viewer gets a little shaky to see the other side have six or seven states called for them and your candidate just one.

I confess that more important then calling any state right is the victory.  I don't always have happy predictions. But it's twice as nice to be right and have your candidate win.